Modeling Monday: Railings, Posts, & Painting

Work in Wethersfield continues, with a focus on structures. First, I added some details (railings and porch light) for the Ballantine's beer distributor office.

The railings are from Central Valley and Plastruct. The porch lights are Tichy #8170). Just took a quick shot of flat black rattle can paint.

I drilled holes to accommodate the railings and glued the lamp to the bracket.

I glued the light over the door and carefully added the partial railings onto the top landing. All that's left to do on this structure is a bit of weathering on the roof and the foundation/stairs.

Next, I started to paint the Wethersfield Lumber Co office. The base color is dark gray rattle can primer, then Apple Barrel Granite Gray on the walls, purposely painted lightly to simulate worn & peeling paint. The trim color comes next and will "dress up" the relatively messy walls.

While I was at it, I drybrushed the same "granite gray" paint over the outhouse. I was pleasantly surprised to see how much it looks like weathered wood.

While I was in the paint room, I grabbed the lineside details I'd spray painted last week (yes, that's actually white - the color in the camera is off a bit).

ChrisZ made these from actual New Haven RR prototypes, including beveled base and top, and - most impressively - recessed letters!

The recessed letter isn't only prototypical, it makes it pretty easy to paint. The base color is, of course, white but I used a 000 brush to add black acrylic craft paint to the recess. Of course, even if you're extra careful, you're going to get black onto the face of the post. No worries - just drybrush some more white over the letter.

It wasn't that hard to do, but it is fairly fussy work and does take some time. But it's an enjoyable way to spend a bit of time for some really cool details, especially with a cup of coffee and podcasts playing.

I spent a LONG time Saturday on Wethersfield. The good news is that I had a nice long block of time to spend. The bad news is that I don't have lots of progress to show for the amount of time used.

However, I did plow through some mental roadblocks and tried my hand at making a few different grade crossings - and roads. Stay tuned & maybe you'll pick up a few tips!

Hijacked by Life - and License Plates

I know you know how it is. Sometimes - more often than you'd like, to be sure - your hobby gets hijacked by Life: all those things on various lists to do.

For me lately, it's been a "light" remodeling of the downstairs bathroom (which is, typical of such projects, taking much longer than planned) as well as the usual seasonal chores of leaf raking & wood splitting/piling. In addition, I decided to finally cut down some huge trees limbs (but they're as big as trees, and tougher to get to), which resulted in a huge mess to clean up (and more firewood).

Fortunately though, the NHRHTA Photo Library volunteers nights have restarted - moving to Fridays temporarily since every single Thursday night until the end of the year is booked with various work & charity meetings as well as holiday parties(!)

And so it goes. I'm sure you have similar tales of hobby time thwarted.

But the bathroom will be done soon (hopefully this week) and the leaves/trees will be taken care of (hopefully this weekend), and with all the "new found" time, work will continue on The Valley Line. In the meantime, here's something fun....

Depending on your scale, it may not be all that noticeable, but starting in HO scale and larger, you might want to consider....

...wait for it ....

License plates

Along with automobiles and reweigh stencils on your freight cars, license plates set your layout in a particular time. For Connecticut, here's what a license plate looks/looked like in my modeling year of 1947:

Here's where I found it:
http://www.ctplates.info/ct_pass40-49.html  There should be similar websites for other states.

Many kudos to you if you're at that level of detail on your layout. But even if you're not, I think they're another great way of researching and experiencing the history of what you're modeling. With a little PhotoShop work, the numbers should be easy enough to change. Now I just have to figure out how large tiny these things are gonna be . . .