The plaster got a basic coat of wall paint. I made a mix of yellow and brown for the area around the drainage channel. For the rest of the layout I added black to this mix and painted all visible surfaces.

I prepared the mount for the LED-Strip-Lights. The strips are equipped with an adhesive tape and have and illuminate with an angle of 120 degree. To maximise the light yield and reduce the loss I cut an strip of wood at an angle of 30 degree. This strip and the LEDs should be mounted at the very front of the cover, directly behind the fascia. I made some tests with this installation before fixing it in place.

After the backdrop was fixed my daughter and I could move on and paint it. The first color we mixed was pretty blue. Too blue. Thus we added some black and white to tone it down. Now we got a nice blue-gray background which imitates a normal day. Now we may add some clouds.

After the paint dried, we created some paper stencils for the clouds. We tried spraying the clouds as I remember seeing in TMTV Juli 2014. I guess we did reuse the same stencil to often. Additionally the spray can was too small and didn’t work very clean. My wife doesn’t like the look of the clouds and thinks they look to uniform. May be we will repaint the backdrop and the clouds later but for now they will stay. Regarding the photos: The camera of my iPhone has collected some dirt, so all the dark fringes in the fuzz in the pictures is not used as backdrop color 😉

The last few days I spent a quite some time with track planning. I planned two very comparable layouts, based on Palmetto by Lance Mindheim. My first version is in HO. As I am used to this scale and I was pretty sure that this is the scale to go. Then I tried the same (or similar) in N scale. There are #10 turnouts available for the Atlas code 55 track. Awesome!

The culvert was fixed in place with plaster. The kids used the opportunity to give the landscape a basic shape. And they had fun doing it.

After the plaster has dried for a while, we glued the tracks to the surface. We used any that was in reach to fix it down, while the glue could set.

I covered the manhole in the backdrop with 0.5 mm styrene and some carpenters glue. It was fixed in placed to give the glue some time with some stones from the garden.

My vision for this small layout is using a display-style (lightbox?) fascia. As this layout is intend for learning and experiments I wanted to try a curved backdrop. I want my kids to have fun with this layout. Currently they not as tall as I am, so I had the idea of curving the background from the back to the top. This leaves me with square corners on the left and right, bit I hope this can be covered up with some scenery.

I have prepared my Märklin K-Track turnouts to be operated from below the benchwork. While removing the cover under the track, the switch rod broke apart. I have rebuilt it from a tiny strip of 1 mm styrene. I hope this works.

I gave the model a coat of primer from the the spray can. Later my daughter helped me with the colouring of the model and the details.

This version of a culvert is built from 1 mm styrene. The curved tunnel is made from 0.5 mm styrene. The profile of the rocks and bricks have been carved into the surface of the styrene. The idea is to paint the parts accordingly to recreated the look of the original.

After not being satisfied with the result of my first try, I took my bike, camera and dog to search a new prototype for my little culvert.

This culvert is a little overgrown but the basic shape is still very good visible. In contrast to my first try this culvert has been built from rock and bricks. The tunnel is round and not square. So this element is a little more complex, but we will see how it works out.

I used 1 mm styrene to build a model of this culvert. This is my very first work with this material and my very first try of modelling anything based on a prototype. Here is the result.

Honestly I’m not too happy with the result. After trying to add some texture to the concrete part failed and I have stopped the work on this part. I will look for a different prototype.