Model Railroad Blog

Earth Tone Static Grass – Jan. 16

Experimentation continues with producing the earth toned grasses. My kitchen table looks like Edison’s lab at this point. I’ve established a few things:

-The fibers will in fact accept the coloring.

-The composition of the Woodland Scenics fibers seems to work best.

-Grays are relatively straight forward to create which is great.

My biggest hurdle thus far has been with the browns as the Procean MX brown dye has a reddish cast. I tried to knock that down with olive, which didn’t work. Tech support from Jacquard, maker of the Procion MX dyes, is excellent however and they seem to have offered the solution. They wrote:

Hello lance,

You are correct that you should be knocking down reds with green. 
Now olive is sort of brown already, so it is a little more like adding brown, which will darken the color, but won’t knock it down as much as a brighter green.  You would be surprised. The more vibrant the green, the better it is at removing the red.  So while you used 20% olive, I would suggest more like 5-10% of bright green.  It will work much better to kill your red.  It is possible to overshoot and get a green brown, so it is best to add a little at a time. 

Alexander Preston

Chief Creative Strategist

Manufacturers of Jacquard Products

That’s next weekend’s project, going back to the drawing board using the mixing strategy Jacquard suggested.

Earth Toned Grass

The importance of a model railroad scenic feature can often be measured by the layout surface area it covers. By that measure, grass falls at the top of the list. Given it’s importance, it’s odd that it isn’t talked about more. For the most part it gets a passing treatment on layouts at best.

One of my primary modeling goals this year is to study this scenic feature more closely and take a really, really hard look at how to get much more effective results. In particular, finding a way to create the commonly fund earth tones. What this will entail is R&D, trial and error, and practicing different methods of application, mixing, and application.

As I mentioned in my recent book, color drives everything and grass is no different. While we have a great range of greens to choose from, the equally common earth tone colors are non-existent. Talking to various manufacturers, it’s clear that having browns, tans, and gray grass colors is going to be non-flyer anytime soon. It’s just not going to happen.

That leaves making it yourself as the only option, a task I’ve been putting off for years. No longer. It’s time to learn how to do this.

A friend referred me to an excellent YouTube tutorial by gtScottMiniatures which you can watch HERE . 

The technique in the video is simple and absolutely does work. The dyes are inexpensive and easily obtained through Dick Blick. The flock he mentions isn’t available but Woodland Scenic’s straw colored static grass/flock works absolutely fine.

Initial attempts to create various grays have been very successful. Up next will be the browns followed by different methods of mixing and application. Stay tuned!

Downtown Spur Operations

On December 28, 2018 Tolga Erbora caught Y120 working The Downtown Spur in full daylight and filmed it’s entire switching sequence in an outstanding YouTube documentary.

One of the biggest advantages of modeling the present is that research information is so easily attainable. For example you can make site visits to measure and photograph structures, streets, or rolling stock.

It also makes having all of your answers relatively easily answered in terms of how operations unfolded. Case in point, yesterday Tolga Erbora filmed an outstanding documentary of the local working the Downtown Spur. The film starts as the train enters the spur, follows it’s operations, and concludes with it leaving the line. Not only does this tell us which industries were worked but how many cars were involved, their type, and number. The film also shows the exact sequences used and how long the entire process took.

Click HERE to view the documentary.

With respect to how long the entire sequence took, Tolga wrote: ” They left the yard around 8:50, worked FPT between 9:15 and 9:45, then we got O721 for Homestead and breakfast. Caught up with the train at 11:20 at 12th Ave. Followed west to Sun Gas which was worked between 11:30 and 11:50, then they got to Hialeah at 12:20. “

The beauty of all of this information is that I could model the prototype session exactly on my layout.

Model Railroading As Art

This week I finally finished and released my latest book, Model Railroading As Art.  Of all the books I’ve done so far, this was by far, the most challenging.  Articulating the subjective, artistic concepts in this case, is no easy task.  About half way through the project I took a hiatus and went to night school at The Smithsonian to gain a stronger background in art theory.  When all was said and done the page count came in at over 140, almost a third longer than my previous efforts.  Before I started over a year ago I seriously considered tackling subjects with a more known market appeal, structures for example.  In the end I had to follow my heart and do something I felt hadn’t been done before and filled a void.  Time will tell how helpful it ultimately becomes to the hobby at large.   You can purchase it through Amazon HERE.

Finally, Some Water!

I wanted to get one of the water scenes in as it takes away some of the guesswork as to what the overall composition is supposed to be.  Aerials indicate the bay is essentially a teal hue which I created using a 50/50 mix of blue and green acrylic craft paints.  When that dried, I applied gloss medium using a gentle vertical stabbing motion to add texture.  The pier face is a mix of styrene and stained strip wood.