A Little Work On The Layout

Last week I wrote here about starting to work on an area of layout as a break from doing more freight car weathering, so here's just a little bit of progress on that front...

I had never done any work at all on the crossing that I intended for this location. The road just sort of ended at the edge of the track. The black part of the road is 1/8" foam from Michaels, and the white portions are .020 styrene.

I painted that white styrene with "weathered black". I'll also spray that on the black foam as well to fade that down a bit.  I think I might have just barely enough ballast on hand here to fill in that track switch at the left.  I don't have any crossing gates or warning lights to put here.  Hopefully sometime.

I submitted this photo (below) from the layout to Model Railroader magazine recently, to see if maybe they would use it in the Trackside Photos section of the magazine.  I very quickly received a nice reply back from the editor explaining that although they would like to use the photo, they are unable to do so because of the short depth of field of focus.

And you know what? He's right.

The engine is in focus, which it should be of course. But the industrial building goes out of focus, and the foreground including the overpass is way too blurry also. My little camera doesn't allow me to change the aperture setting, so controlling depth of field is a problem.

So, I sent in a couple of other pictures to MR that have better focus, and quickly received a note back telling me that they should be able to use one of them. My fingers are crossed that sometime in the future one of the two will appear in the magazine.