Progress on the Scrap Metal Yard

Earlier in the week, Brian Smith sent along a link to the February video update of Thomas Klimoski's excellent Georgia Northeastern Railroad. This model railroad is a favourite of mine, and Mr. Klimoski does a great job with his videos.  If I could ever get my JSSX up to this level of modeling, I'd be thrilled.

Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bs68-LgoVU&feature=youtu.be

I've been asked to weather a trio of RBOX boxcars for another local modeler, so I stayed busy doing some of that through the week.  He wants them to have the logo "ghosted", where the black lettering has worn off, leaving the the ghost of the logo to appear in the yellow of the boxcar.

As for any progress on my JSSX, that has been a bit lacking as I'm still involved in weathering a number of railcars and such.  However, I did get just a little bit done on the area of my scrap metal yard.

The corrugated steel fencing that surrounds the scrap yard is complete. The fencing scales out to approximately 8 feet high, which seems to me like it would be about right for this type of business. I still need to build a couple of chain link entrance gates to the property - one for the rail entrance and one for the street entrance as well. For the corrugted fencing, I've actually used a paper steel roofing made by a company called Paper Creek.  I was given several sheets of this product several years ago and have finally found a use for it.  I bonded the paper to .020 styrene with 3M 777 spray adhesive.

To break up the look of the steel fence, I also cropped and printed part of a photo I'd taken of the corrugated steel siding on the wall of a business here in town.  That steel siding had been painted white, and some of the paint has begun peeling off.  I thought that the change of colour would be a nice visual change and suggest that part of the fence had been replaced at some time.

I've started to create the scrap piles from scraps of 2 inch thick blue styrofoam insulation. I have yet to even paint the one to the right of the gondolas.  It's 24 inches long and I'll likely make it a or rusty colour as a base for a pile of scrap steel.  The grey coloured piles will be for scrap aluminum. I'm not sure yet just what I'll cover them with to simulate loose metal pieces.  I'll have to come up with something though...

 I need to build a gate for the rail entrance to the property and for the vehicle entrance from the roadway on the left.

The lighter coloured portion of the fence has been cropped and printed from a photo of corrugated siding found locally.  It looks like Luc's backhoe is finished clearing out one gondola and getting ready to start on the 2nd one.

I cropped the roof and parking lot out of this picture, then printed and mounted it to .020 thick styrene to make part of the fence. 

The blue and grey mounds will become the scrap metal piles. Their 2" height would be about scale 14.5 feet, which seems like it would be high enough.  Besides, any higher would begin to block too much of the view of the train that's running behind the scrap yard, and we can't have that!