It’s been about a month since the last update and there’s been quite of bit of work that’s happened since then.
First up was my final Metcalfe card stock kit, the Corner Shop and Pub kit is actually two buildings, as you can see it was actually two buildings in one kit, and i assembled them into the Prince of Whales Pub and Jack Flint & Son Meats.
I’ve also been trying to decide what to do about the inclines on the east and west sides. On the inside of the East Side incline I used the Walthers concrete retaining wall kit, they look good since the incline is curved the straight pieces of the kit look ok but I wasn’t sure they’d look great on the outside of the curves.
Metcalfe makes card stock retaining walls that I think look really good, but they don’t recommend that you use them on curves. I had been tempted to use them anyway knowing that the card stock is flexible when I remembered the “brick” incline that was on my first layout.
While not a particularly great shot, you can see the wall here. While I didn’t know what size bricks I had used on the old layout, after a bit of searching I found 1:35 scale clay bricks on Amazon. I mentioned this project in my last post, and after hand laying approximately 4,200 bricks the West Side incline is done and I think it looks really good.
In addition to the retaining wall on the outside AND the inside of the curve the outside of the curve has been landscaped.
I used a grass mat from Noch that I purchased from America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop (note – despite the name, I’m not convinced that they truly are “America’s best” but they do have one of the best selections of scenery products in my area) for ground cover. I’ve always been skeptical of grass mats, but it may be because most of the time they’re rolled out onto a train table with track slapped on top of them and nothing else done. I think this map looks good especially when additional foliage and other scenery elements are added. The other scenery elements are some bushes and foliage clusters from Woodland Scenics and trees from Heki, some purchased from America’s Best and others from Scenic Express.
