30th Avenue in the vicinity of Sun Gas is lined by rows of palm trees. Time to make a few!
Since there really aren’t any commercially available palm trees that capture the airy and delicate nature of the fronds, they need to be made from scratch. I cut my own using a Black Cat Cougar vinyl cutter, a machine designed for sign and graphics business.
For the frond material I use Oracal 631 peel and stick vinyl sheets. This is what things look like after they roll out of the cutter.
One of the more challenging aspects of modeling Sun Gas is dealing with the fencing that surrounds the compound. By nature chain link fencing is very light and airy and difficult to scale down to model proportions. Here’s a few tips I’ve come up with over the years.
-Use a high quality photo etched product that is already steel colored. If you go with anything that needs to be painted you’ll have to add a layer of paint which makes an already oversize part, even more so after the paint is applied. I use Alkem Scale models fencing.
-Add fence posts but keep them thin. I use the .020″ spring wire that comes with Tortoise switch machines
-Carefully dull down the sheen. Very lightly apply Dullcote in a few passes. If you apply it too thickly it’ll clog up the mesh. Next, airbrush on a an India Ink/alcohol wash to further dull things.
Directly across the rails from CBI, and across the street from Sun Gas, is a cinderblock wall running at least a hundred feet long or so. At some point in time an enterprising “artist” or “tagger” painted a fairly creative mural on it. Personally, I think it looks a lot better with the artwork than the original flat gray masonry. I took a series of photos of the wall in 2011 with an eye towards incorporating it on the layout at some point.
Here’s the full mural after photo editing and stitching the images together.
….and here’s the wall in place on the layout. The spur to CBI is in the foreground. Sun Gas is on the right.
A portion of the Sun Gas compound is walled off with a cinderblock wall behind which is a small service structure. In anticipation of eventually modeling the scene, I took photos back in 2012 to eventually use as photo wallpaper. Okay, so it took me nine years to get around to it!
Back in 2012 the wall had more of a grayish hue. Since I had the best imagery from that time period, I went with that color scheme (as opposed to the faded white it is now). In the foreground you can see how I’m slowly bringing the soil and ballast base up using N scale ballast.
My buddy Brad Trenkamp scratch built these exquisite lpg loading platforms for his own use last year. In an act of great generosity he granted me a long term lease to use them for Sun Gas. They really add a lot to the scene. Thanks Brad!
Standing on the edge of 30th Avenue, facing east, Tolga Erbora catches the local working Sun Gas, an LPG dealer. This is the scene I’m currently working on.
Here’s where Sun Gas, CBI, and 30th Avenue are in relation to the layout as a whole.
One of the more challenging aspects of this scene is working in the 30th Avenue grade crossing as it cuts across the CBI spur (front), main (middle), and Sun Gas lead (back) . Dealing with all of this in the middle of a turnout made it all the more difficult. In situations like this it’s important to keep the flangeways open and to make sure nothing rises above the railhead.
In this view I’ve done a quick and dirty test backdrop using a photo I took a few years ago looking north up 30th Avenue. Although 30th is called an “Avenue” that’s a bit of a stretch! My driveway is wider and in better shape than this narrow, battered, pothole laden, roadway.