Work resumes ....

I haven't done much on the layout lately, but I received a parcel of GreenMax building kits from PlazaJapan today, and it shook me out of my lethargy.  I think I had become a bit bored with working on Davis, and needed to do something else for a while.

Here's an aerial shot of Davis as it now looks, showing the final road arrangement:

Davis is at the point where I can start to add some basic greenery, but as I'm colour-blind, I'm not game to tackle that without help.

The main (and cheapest) item in the package from Japan was a GreenMax deck girder bridge kit, which I want to use (in conjunction with a Central Valley truss bridge) for the crossing of the Washita River.  Although there was once a truss bridge of some sort across the Washita River between Big Canyon and Gene Autry, it was gone by 1960. However, I don't like the bridge that now stands there, so I'm taking some "modellers' licence".

So this afternoon, inspired by the arrival of the GreenMax bridge, I set to work on the river crossing. I had already done some work shaping the Arbuckle mountains further upstream, using blue foam sheets. But I found that job to be more difficult than it looks. Today I went back to the tried-and-true cardboard strip method for the hill and cliff-face on the north side of the river. Here's how it looked after the cardboard webbing was installed:

The clothes pegs are to hold the webbing together while the glue sets. I found that idea on someone's blog, but I forget whose blog it was. To that unknown person go my thanks.

The webbing isn't as close as I have used previously, but that's because my next step was to cover the cardboard web with masking tape:

The Washita River is actually quite wide at the point that I'm modelling, and the slope down to the river on this side should be quite gentle rather than the steep drop that I have built. I'll take another look at that slope tomorrow, but I don't have enough space to do a more accurate representation, and still include the rugged cliff face at Big Canyon. This final picture shows what the area looks like now, although the view is from the opposite side of the tracks (ie the backdrop side).

Too bad I'm not modelling this scene from the opposite side. My representation could be very close.

To see how the area really looked from the aisle side back in the era that I'm modelling, click here.

Well that's it for today. Thanks for looking.