Ballast and Backdrops

I managed to paint the backdrops last night. The project took all of about 10 minutes. I took some Apple Barrel "Holly Branch" green paint and mixed in black until I got the real dark green of distant mountains. Then I mixed up a darker batch for contrast. I slathered onto the wall with a big old paintbrush and that was that.

I've managed to ballast about half of the mainline tracks around the Altoona loop. The process seems to be going smoothly, so I can't complain.
 

For my last trick, I resoldered the feeder wire seen in the bottom right corner of the photo.

The Altoona Endgame

 Hey everybody! I'm back and boy do I have a lot of excuses for all the tumbleweeds blowing through this once-active blog. Want to hear them? Well, I'll tell you anyway (I know I've used that joke before).

First off, for a good little while, my wife and I were seriously considering putting our house on the market. This would necessitate removal of the layout. And there's no point in working on it if you;re goning to tear it down. But, the good news is, we decided to stay put.

Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this blog, I was just getting kind of burnt out on the whole thing. Part of that was not knowing how to finish Altoona and having a lot of unpleasant items on the to-do list. And that, my friends is the subject of this entry.

My plan for Altoona is to finish the shop area, paint some backdrops on the wall, build a bit of mountain along the wall, add turf to the flat areas and call it done. I know, that sound like I taking the easy way out, but hear me out.

I'm building this layout for operation. That means operators in Altoona will be reaching over things and any building in the way stands a high risk of damage. Hence the minimalist approach.

In service of that goal, I painted the rails in the Altoona yard. Normally, rail painting is something I can only stand to do a little at a time. But today? Baby I was in the zone! I knocked it all out in a few hours. And let me tell you, it came down to the last few drops in my bottle Polyscale Rail Brown.

With that, every inch of track on this layout is painted save for the Altoona yard turnouts. I'm not going to bother. In the past, when I've painted them, no matter how careful I am about cleaning them and avoiding the contacts, it results in some very balky turnout operation. Looks may suffer but, I'll take reliability over aesthetics any day.

Now on to ballasting!