Believe it or not ...

Work has actually taken place.

I had gotten a tiny bit of work done since the last post in time for Craig Bisguier, Jeff Adam and Lee Weiss to come over during the lunch break from CSC11 on Saturday and take a look at my 3 feet of track and benchwork. The railroad has been taking its toll and it really does not allow me the time or energy to work on the layout. That changed this week as I have been working later in the day instead of bright and early in the AM. This appears to be kinder on the body's clock, as it were ...

I set about finishing the stretch of track, which is done, basically ... I also set up the frame for my backdrop.

To hold the styrene that I am using in place, I don't plan on using adhesive, but I made clamping blocks using 1x2 lumber that I cut a .060" slot into with a table saw.

  

Since I wanted to see if this was actually going to work ... I tried the unpainted styrene in place. Unfortunately, the sheet that Mike got is only 6' long not 8'. It still wouldn't have fit totally, but there would have been less splicing for me to do ...

For those of you asking: "Why use the blocks? You'll be able to see them! Really? Normally, there will be scenery hiding the bottom edge of the backdrop and the top should be hidden by any valance I put up. It also allows me to take the backdrop up and down much easier so that I don't have to reach over the module to paint it.

Since I really don't trust styrene to hold latex paint, I brought the sheet outside and primed it with a white paint spray bomb from Wal-Mart. Great paint, if you can get it.

Ideally, I think that I would like to model early/late November, possibly in the middle of a snow flurry ... tricky, but I got the idea after looking at this backdrop from Troel's Kirk ... Too bad I'm not a landscape artist like he is ...

That being the case, you all might be wondering about the next few photos, where I am going after a blue sky backdrop ... But it is the easiest to to with the amount of experience that I have, which is none ... So, I went to Lowe's to get some sky blue paint ... But I got tired of taking paint cards outside to look at the perfecgt blue sky, so I took this photo ...

And I came home with this color, as is seen after initially painting the styrene ...

So, here is the backdrop up, but not fastened in place ... I just wanted to have some color behind what I was doing ...

I think it certainly makes a big difference!