Photos of the tram

I've added a few photos of the tram in front of some buildings just to show how the bprinted cobblestone paper looks with the tram on it and some buildings in the background.

I reckon it looks super!

A little landscaping and a tunnel portal.

The model railway is a complex layout in some ways and has a lof of tunnels running at many levels. It's also got the town sitting alongside the tram track. I've made a big effort to line all tunnels with heavy black card and I've done a light paintjob in areas inside the tunnels along the trackwork in a wash of black to get things looking more like a real railway. I have yet to ballast and will be doing light ballasting in more exposed areas "underground" and heavy ballasting everywhere else.

I've also fully levelled the area under the buldings in the town using the same thick black card.

All the tram track has been "filled" with plasticine to make it look more road like. I'll be using cobblestone paper to make the current cork look more road like at each side of the track. More on that later.

All of this has left me in a position to begin more serious landscaping. In order to dip my toe into the water in a small way I've started building the slope up to the left of the main station. In order to complete this area I've had to construct a triple track tunnel portal. I did this simply using brink paper (see here) covering a carefully cut out piece of polystyrene. I added details by covering balsa strips with brick paper and gluing it on. The tunnel arch was reinforced with individually cut out strips of card one bring high which I've arched over the mouth of the tunnel.

Making roads, bridges and tunnels...surfaces

I'm readying myself to make a bunch of stuff for the landscaping and I realised that I need decent stone surfaces for roads etc.

Buying this stuff readily in Sydney is pretty hard and when you do find it, it's quite expensive. Why not use by Canon bubblejet and some matte photo paper and just print exactly what I want?

Google to the rescue...

I did a few searches on Google for Cobblestones and so forth on the Images section and found these:

I then used them as textures to fill rectangles in MS PowerPoint and produced this sort of result (PDF).

Well, I can't believe it's been 12 months!

I have to apologise to everyone who has formerly read thsi blog - it's been about 12 months since I posted. Oh dear!

All I can say is that I got a bit distracted! We renovated the house and had to move out for part of that period, I also designed and built a prototype garden computer which worked, as it turned out but also died due to lack of attention during the renovation.

So now, I'm making up for lost time.

I've made leaps and bounds with the software for the system. It runs very well but the limit has to be 2 trains otherwise it dead-locks eventually with all trains waiting for the others to move. A veritable Mexican stand-off. Furthermore, Andrew Joyner proved that 2 trains was the theoretical limit using some nice maths. Thanks Andrew, if you're reading this. Do you want to post your article?

Still, I've  vowed to stop working on the software and start landscaping. New blog entries will flow this afternoon.