Ground Cover Mostly Done

I haven't posted in a while but I have been making steady progress on the layout. The basic ground cover is done and looking pretty good.

I had a mishap a few weeks ago when I tried to ballast part of the track. The ballast I used was a nice light grey collour when dry, but after the glue hit it, it turned coal-black and stayed like that after drying. Unfortunately I didn't do a test area and had already done a huge area of track. I scraped off as much as I could with a wire brush, and although it's not completely gone it doesn't look that bad, especially after the ties have been painted.

The road and village areas need some touch-ups and most of the track still needs to be painting, but I think it's coming along quite well.

Base Coat of Earth Undertone

I've put down a light layer of plaster overtop the cloth, and added a base coat of earth tone. It's not as shiny as it appears in the image.

Plaster Cloth Complete

I've finally finished adding the last layers of plaster cloth to build up the terrain. Next step is to add cast rock and a plaster layer to the cloth.

Buildings

Placing buildings now, and building up road network

Quick Update

The plaster cloth for the hills is complete, now I'm building up flat areas for buildings and will add in raised paths for roads and streets. Building the table with foldable legs really helped when the time came to rotate the layout to get at the far side.

Update

Not too much more to show at the moment. I've been adding cardboard supports for the hills that I will eventually be creating using plaster cloth. I added another small platform in the middle of the layout that will provide the base for a pagoda building, but it's not going to hold any track on it.

Our cat has certainly found a comfortable spot in spite of the layout getting more and more crowded.

Track Complete!

With the addition of a small raised level in the corner of the layout, Taihoku 1937 is now track complete. Adding the supports to the wooden bridge went well, and it seems level, stable, and strong.

The rest of the upper level seems to have been fixed to the base surface quite well. No issues with movement yet.

I even started cutting out the planned pond, removing one layer of the hollow core door. Our cat also got involved in the photoshoot.

Next step is to connect all the feeder wires together into a single plug for the controller, then to start planning the terrain.