layout New layout project: Sakuragi no yu sen

[Kingmeow]

Please have good ventilation!

 

I have read that the colored stuff (at least here in the US) can give off toxic fumes when cut with a hot knife or wire.  The majority we use here is pink and made by Dow Corning.  We find them mainly in Home Depot (big box store selling home improvement stuff and tools).  There's another type that is greenish blue that's carried by Lowes (similar to Home Depot).  I don't remember what company makes that.

 

In terms of how toxic I don't know but I've read don't cut it in an enclosed basement or room.

 

There is also white foam, the stuff used to make coffee cups.  Those supposedly is not toxic when cut hot.

 

Again, this is what I've read on some of the model railroad forums.  How true it is I don't know as I didn't research it deeply but it's better to be safe than sorry.  Any plastic type material giving off fumes can't be good for you!

[cteno4]

All polystyrene foams (expanded or beaded/closed cell) make the same toxic fumes when cut with a hot knife. You need to be doing your cutting outside with some air movement via wind or a small fan drawing the fumes away from you. It’s not recommended you do this inside your apartment! This is the big drawback of using hot knifes and wires.

 

hot knifes tend to melt the foam a lot more than hot wire cutters as the knife edge stays in contact with foam edge a lot more than the thin wire and thus make a lot more fumes. Also since a knife melts the edge the foam a lot more it can harden and be hard to then do finer shaping with rasps or sandpapers. Hot wires though can be a lot harder to manipulate in cutting larger pieces.

 

Do be careful handling the hot edges of just cut polystyrene as the melted polystyrene there may look solid but is just glazed over and still cna be melted under the glaze and pushing on it with a finger can result in melted polystyrene oozing out and sticking to your fingers. It’s a bad burn as not like the stove and pulling your finger away the heat goes away and it also melts into your skin and hard to wipe off. Polystyrene foam is a very good insulator so little heat is lost into the foam it is mostly lost to the air side.

 

All these are the reasons I just don’t do hot cutting of foam anymore and just go at it with serrated knives, rasps, and sandpaper and use a simple light mask and the vacuum cleaner a lot. I like to texture foam by hand and the melted edges just make it difficult to do that.
 

The different colors of the expanded polystyrene sheets is just done to indicate manufacturers, all the same basic stuff.

 

jeff

[SL58654号]

Lesson learned. I'm no longer using the hot knife. Just hand tools from this point on. 

[cteno4]

Sorry we should have been clearer those fumes are not good things to be around inside. The good news is that other than a few organic solvents in glues and paints you might encounter, the burning polystyrene fumes are about the worst you will ever encounter in the hobby!

 

it’s totally fine if outside or in a big indoor area like a garage with some ventilation, but in a small apartment I would not do it in your living space.

 

When carving and sanding, just keep vacuuming as you go along and it tends to keep the dust down. But even then I’d say do as much as you can outside if you can just to avoid having to continually clean it up in your living space. Serrated knives (try the 100yen store for some) works very well and tends to make a lot less annoying dust than a hand or electric saw does.

 

you can create a lot of nice looking stuff just carefully sculpting the foam and then painting it, but it’s one of those scenery things that varies a lot from one pair of hands to another. Many just do the rough form of the terrain and then cover in plaster cloth, plaster, paper mache, scultimould, ground goop (vermiculite and white glue mix), etc as sculpting foam is not their thing. Take a hunk of foam and practice some and see if you can get the results you want, if not just use the foam as the rough base and try some of the covering options to see what speaks to your hands.

 

if you find the foam just too annoying you can always just layer up corrugated cardboard sheets like a contour/topology map. Start with the bottom layer(s) and hack into shape and pin down, then just keep repeating with more layers. Then fill in the steps with plaster, joint compound, ground goop, sculptimould, etc. avoids the foam dust but but more planning and fiddling required.

 

scenery is the one place where folks can really get frustrated as it’s so dependent on the person. I’ve seen and personally experience one technique work fantastically for me or others and failures for others and other techniques visa versa! Even for similar techniques this is true—Plaster cloth, I hate it, but I like paper mache, others just the opposite! Luckily for most scenery things there are numerous approaches/techniques and just have to experiment some to find out which one speaks to your hands! The key is to experiment a lot, it pays off big time! So many folks launch into large scenery projects with little experimenting and things flub up and they get very frustrated. It’s the main point I’ve folks get so frustrated and stalled and then, sadly, end up leaving the hobby. It’s also a period you usually can t run trains much and this also sucks some enjoyment out of the hobby for many so set up a loop on the kitchen table with to keep playing with your trains. It’s the biggest choke point I’ve seen for folks in the hobby once they get going on a layout.
 

oh yes and with scenery be prepared for things to get dirty in your work space as well as tracks and such. If you can avoid attaching your track as long as possible that is good, especially points. Once track is in place put tape over it while working on scenery and be especially careful around the points. Don’t do any really liquid techniques (like flooding ballast with dilute glue) around points as it can get into them potentially (around points you can paint on thicker glue that won’t wick into parts and gently place ballast into the glue). Small bits of scenery material also seem to jsut get magnetically drawn into points so don’t let that crap build up. Plastic tarps on the floors as well as scenery crap seems to fly everywhere while you work on it. There are also a ton of little hand held cordless vacuums these days for $5-20 that work great at layout cleanup. The benefits of them are it’s hand held and don’t have to keep minding where the vacuum hose is draping on things on the layout, simpler to use so you will grab it more often to cleanup as you go, and if you do suck up a part you want back it’s easy to find it in the little catch chamber (with using the big vacuum I always stretch a piece of nylon stocking across the hose at some point to catch parts before going into the vacuum bag).

 

cheers

 

jeff

[Beaver]

I find the best hand tool for cutting foams, expanded foams, polystyrenes etc is a razor saw with the finest teeth you can get. The tiny teeth will not catch on or tear foam particles and very little force is required, so the cuts are very accurate and do not distort the foam.

[SL58654号]

9 hours ago, Beaver said:

I find the best hand tool for cutting foams, expanded foams, polystyrenes etc is a razor saw with the finest teeth you can get. The tiny teeth will not catch on or tear foam particles and very little force is required, so the cuts are very accurate and do not distort the foam.

Then I think that's what I'll go with! Thanks.

[SL58654号]

To add to the sturdiness as well as reduce stress on the wooden dowels (which are the only things holding the control panel built, admittedly rather anomalously, out of solid wood beam stock) I bought these iron angles that I plan on attaching underneath via screws so that any weight from leaning on the control panel won't come to any detriment of the structural integrity of my layout table. After all, I want this whole thing to be built to last. 

 

Afterward, it's finally time to make serious progress on the landscaping. 

[SL58654号]

After abandoning (thank goodness) the idea of using hot cutting tools and making noxious fumes for shaping the foam scenery, I tried sculpting it by hand with little more than a blade. I started to get cold feet and put the project to the sidelines for a while, especially while I was looking for more/new work, until I was recommended these cheese grater-like shavers that really give the foam mountains the shape that I'm looking for. There's less hassle and far more control in achieving the desired effect with these, especially in such important matters as making gradients for the track that look natural and go flush with the base. I also picked up this kit for making trees of my layout's official namesake. Courtesy of Kumamoto Nikkyosha hobby store. 

If I work fast enough, without rushing things, maybe I'll get it presentable by July for another Hisatsu Line-again exhibition.

 

The one year anniversary since the day I first conceived of building and owning my own N gauge Japanese layout is fast approaching. How well would you more experience modelers out there say I've fared thus far? 

Edited May 31 by SL58654号

[cteno4]

Yep except for having to keep vacuuming up foam bits and dust, I’ve vastly more liked shaping with knife and sandpaper than Hotwire. While Hotwire in some situations can be fast I just find too many draw backs to it. Good old pointy serrated steak knife was always the best for quick rough shaping then usually the simplest past that was a small piece of 60-120 grid sandpaper wrapped around my finger. I’ve tried all sorts of rasps and graters in the way past but found none worked very much better than the simple sandpaper on my finger where I have a lot more control and options. Most rasps and graters were kind of one trick ponies. Plain old bare hack saw blade also is a useful tool to shave off larger flatter bits or cut walls. 

 

Man, has it been a year already?!  would say you have come a long way in both your modeling and your woodworking. Learning basic woodworking isn’t all that hard, it just takes time and practice to get better and quick at it. You seem to have a very good grasp now of how things should go together and plan out how to get there! 
 

kudos and happy first anniversary of your layout path!

 

jeff

 

ps glad to see you and Alistair are getting together there in Japan, I can see you two being as thick as thieves!

[SL58654号]

Time is closing in on the next opportunity to exhibit the layout. The scenery is finally coming along.
Here is my projected process to complete the landscaping:

• Sculpting the foam mountains and gradients till they're appropriately shaped. (underway)
• Glue the foam mountains in place permanently to the foam table surface.
• Paint the landscape an overall tan/earth hue and prepare for ground cover.
• While the paint is still wet apply the ground cover - grass, earth colors etc. where appropriate.
• Use glue spray (what's the proper term for it?) to keep the ground cover protected in place. 
• Place down the final track layout and caulk the track to the surface.
• Start adding trees, etc. 
• Enjoy the layout! 

Does anyone have any suggestions to that plan? The reason why I'm here is it's great to always have feedback and tips offered by fellow enthusiasts, after all. I don't want to paint myself into a corner with this step, either. 

[cteno4]

Sounds like a plan! If you can keep the track off for the bulk of the scenery process it will help a lot and you can be much messier with the scenery. Trying to keep track and points clean with tape can just be a pain. On larger layouts track laying is a bigger deal and usually why done first, but on a small layout is pretty easy to add back in layer and Unitrak greatly helps make this easier. You then just need to scrape off any scenery junk along the track path and lay in your track and then just fill in the small gap with some ballast and misc scenery details. This little transition space actually can be some interesting little detail areas to make things pop so it kind of focuses your attention on it to do it like this space as the last bit of scenery. Doing this strip well also helps make the Unitrak distract from any plasticiness of the Unitrak roadbed. Experiment with applying some matte medium (Matt clear acrylic to the roadbed sides, it can help take the sheen off the plastic and you can eve sprinkle on some very fine bits of various scenery materials here and there into the side ballast as there are usually bibs and bobs of all sorts of stuff and stains there. This all helps to obfuscate the plastic roadbed well.

 

you need to add in placing structures and faring them into the scenery and adding roads and line marking in along with some telephone and light poles. Last vehicles and figures.

 

enjoy!

 

jeff

[Junech]

Did you think about something to keep most of the dust in your room away from the layout? For example, self-built trees are hard to clean from dust, so it would be good to do something about dust protection before placing trees.

[MeTheSwede]

9 hours ago, SL58654号 said:

• Paint the landscape an overall tan/earth hue and prepare for ground cover.
• While the paint is still wet apply the ground cover - grass, earth colors etc. where appropriate.
• Use glue spray (what's the proper term for it?) to keep the ground cover protected in place. 

 

Why apply ground cover while the paint is still wet? Shouldn't the paint be somewhat dry before applying glue to get the ground cover down?

 

 

[cteno4]

Some sprinkle ground cover onto wet paint to let it semi attach into the paint. Once dry hit with the usual spray glue/acrylic to lock all the ground cover in place. I’ve done it and I think the only benefit may be that maybe some of the ground cover looks a bit more lite it’s coming out of the paint layer than just sitting on top, but that’s a pretty close look. Given trying to do both at once maybe a little saner to let paint dry and paint on glue mix where you want ground over and apply it, then once dry hit it with spray glue/medium.

 

jeff

[SL58654号]

11 hours ago, Junech said:

Did you think about something to keep most of the dust in your room away from the layout? For example, self-built trees are hard to clean from dust, so it would be good to do something about dust protection before placing trees.

Thanks for the warning. My Sakura trees will be kit-made and I certainly keep my whole apartment, let alone my train room, as clean as a whistle. I vacuum and dust regularly. The room has two windows that allow good ventilation too. 

[SL58654号]

A little more incremental progress today: Though I slept in this Sunday morning, as I felt exhausted after my first week of my full-time job, I took some time to get some work done on the railroad. Mostly a lot more shaving away at the landscape, but I also decided to cut the wood that will make what I intend to by the layout's nameplate - I'll hand carve the kanji after some practice into it and paint the wording black.  

I decided to add a "deck" bridge in the back. Maybe I'll buy the one offered in the matching color to the focal truss bridges. 
From this experience I've learned that making a layout is a marathon, not a race, and it feels good taking breaks between stages and not rushing things. 

[Junech]

6 hours ago, SL58654号 said:

Thanks for the warning. My Sakura trees will be kit-made and I certainly keep my whole apartment, let alone my train room, as clean as a whistle. I vacuum and dust regularly. The room has two windows that allow good ventilation too.

 

What I do for my layouts and in our club is to put Painter Sheets over the layout. Comparing covered and uncovered layouts over the years it helps a lot to keep dust away from the layout (even if you clean the room regularly).

 

If you use the thinnest sheets you can directly lay it on the layout without breaking anything but the thin sheets will fall apart really quickly.

 

Normally we just do that during exhibitions and in our club rooms we have the thicker sheets and have tightened wires above the layout with the help of some wood.

 

It might be an idea to think about. For your layout it should be enough to have a wooden beam at each corner and use strong wires or something similar.

 

Junech

[cteno4]

If the room doesn’t have open windows a small hepa air filter really helps keep dust down. But opening windows would negate much of that. Simple very light weight painters plastic like @Junech suggests works wonders. Easy to do with 2 people, but with one person your layout is small enough you can figure out a simple way to put it on yourself. Just have to be delicate to not drag over trees or scenery bits or catch on structures.

 

jeff

[SL58654号]

In addition to my layout complementing our exhibitions for the Hisatsu Line, and hopefully drawing much more interest than photographs alone, while the real SL Hitoyoshi may be dormant now, there is still a ray of sunshine with this...

Thank goodness for Live Steam! This little beauty is in the ownership of a Japanese friend of mine who is an avid live steamer. He recently finished restoring/overhauling this coal-fired 5 inch gauge replica of 58654 handed down and entrusted to him by the late Toshimitsu Ozawa - the man who rescued C11 190 from scrap! He himself was a legendary rail fan in the area of Kumamoto, and I myself got to see his home filled with railwayana. 

 

So, with my layout to draw spectators, my buddy plans to bring life to our exhibitions with this wonderful "Mini SL" - patterned after the one and only... and with numerous headmarks! 

[cteno4]

All I can say is ooooooooooohhh! 
 

awesome sauce you can display with him and stuff like this!

 

jeff

[lighthouse]

Wow, very awesome!

 

[SL58654号]

On 6/11/2024 at 9:52 PM, SL58654号 said:

 

And if a live steam locomotive weren't enough, look what my friend plans to make to go with it!

You do after all need riding cars to carry passengers in the live steam hobby! Will they have their own JR ladies? 

[SL58654号]

Layout progress is slogging along slowly but surely.

 

In the meantime, while Hisatsu Sen-Again have helped to pass the hurdle of keeping the line safe from abandonment, our next desired challenge to undertake is what'll come after the railway is rebuilt. What is the Hisats Line without steam?
A poster was made today, and they asked for my opinion - I told them to place "REVIVE" in capitals on top and the number below. Note the QR code for our website.

All in all, how can I not be excited by the chance to endorse such a cause with my layout project? 

[SL58654号]

The landscaping is coming along. I'll send more progress photos soon.
At the school that I work at full-time, an autumn festival is being held in late October. To my delight I've gotten permission and a potential dedicated space to exhibit my layout to people young and old during this event, along with barriers to keep spectators at a polite distance. I hope to encourage and invite viewers to drive my trains under my supervision to really entice them into the wonders of this amazing hobby. Wish me well!  

[cteno4]

That’s great! Sounds like the perfect event to debut it at!
 

You don’t need the barriers at all. We have eliminated them at shows for over 15 years now and it’s been no problem to let folks right up to the layout. There will be a few fingers now and then but a gentle please don’t touch works fine. Kids usually respond well and the few problem children are almost always taken care of by a parent. Adults actually poke as much or more than kids do (and we have a ton of kids at our events, even really young ones) and adults are the worst about responding well to the please don’t touch! I expect Japanese crowds may be a bit more respectful of a display than our audience is here in the states. We don’t have any problems with no barricades doing 75-100 hrs a year of display at events with tons of kids, some with 50-100k visitors, and some very crowded and dense. Once in a while a tree may be knocked over, but some glue and fixed. We have way more breakage with transport, setup, and teardown! 
 

Having to stand a foot or two back behind a barricade really impairs what they can see, you are adding a couple hundred scale feet to their viewing distance and they won’t seem any details with n scale sizes. One of the joys with n scale is as you get up close and look the little details pop out and really delight the visitors. It’s the thing folks comment on probably the most is their delight and surprise at finding little details around in the layout. When we did stanchions and bamboo cross pieces way long ago with public setups folks still reached in and poked now and then when the stanchions at about 24” out anyway. Stanchion bases are also a tripping hazard. Even with adding bright yellow tape around the edges of our stanchion bases folks still tripped up on them now and then. Never anything bad fortunately, but any trip can turn into a fall and that is the last thing you want at a public event, someone hurt.

 

Have a friend there who can keep watch with you. Having folks, especially the kids getting right up nose to nose with the trains is a huge, huge hit and barricades are a real downer.

 

If you have a section of track right at the edge of the table then maybe adding a small 3cm high strip of plex in front of that could help a train from getting knocked to the floor, but again we have had trains right near the edge on club layouts and Ttrak is only 1.5” from the edge and never a train has gone off on its own or with fingers. But the plex just looks ugly and impairs the view and framing of the layout. We stopped using it on the club layout after a year or so as it just mucked up viewing.

 

The biggest issue with letting folks come right up to the layout is people taking pictures or even pointing with bags or purses over their arms, dangling camera straps, and big sleeves (kimonos are the worst!). But you can see these coming way far away and easy to monitor and warn folks if it’s headed for trouble. Probably had these things cause as many or more derailments or small parts knocked loose than fingers. And total maybe 2 or 3 derailments  and/or parts knocked loose per show.

 

Barricades just send a bad message to the brain before they even see the layout; Keep away! We think you are guilty before having done anything! We don’t trust you! You are bad! Leaves a bad mark in their mind and that not only takes away from their experience but it retards it from going into long term memory and getting that that fuzzy wam memory recall. This is one of the prime things I had to deal with in exhibit design with artifacts on how you can keep anything at a minimum between visitor and the artifact. For decades we have kept things in exhibits as unarmored as possible even when clients push for things like putting plex even over video screens for fear of folks touching the screens or marring them. But it’s never happened! I’ve had friends in the biz and aquesse to stuff like this and the plex gets scratched up by visitors and even written on. Saying right up front we don’t trust you just sub consciously (and probably consciously for some as well) pisses visitors off from the get to and funnel them into behaving badly like you assumed they would. If you trust and respect your visitor, they then will trust and respect you back. It’s true.

 

Sorry to harp on this it’s just something I’ve had tons of experience with from museum exhibit development and from 20 years with our local club doing public events and a really, really important part of the visitors and your experience! 

 

Having kids run trains is great, but it takes a bit of oversight to do it. Biggest thing to deal with is the impulse to go way over speed and change speeds rapidly. You may be lucky in Japan where I bet more kids and adults have experience running trains. Other thing is dealing with how long they get to run the train and frustration with lines. That’s not horrible to deal with just takes bandwidth to keep an eye on how many waiting and how long someone has been running. It’s best one person just focused on dealing with the visitors running train and only focus on that and someone else focusing on fingers and fielding questions. Kids are smart too as sometimes when we had a loop for kids to run and we would say younger 5 laps, they would run the trains really slow to get the most time out of it! Pretty funny. But so enjoyable to see the kids nose to nose with the scene and trains and that wild fun glee they get, you know you just put a super good train memory in that young brain and well as just giving them some great fun! Same with adults spending time staring at the modules and looking up with glee when they find an interesting detail and show someone next to them, they get a bit kid like and you know you are spurring their imagination. It’s why I put all the effort into shows.

 

jeff