Burlington Northern's Nelson Subdivision: Progress Update #7 New Scenery

The next big project that I'm currently tackling is the scenery of the highway 395 crossing, Boise Cascade plywood mill, and the huge scene involving the Columbia River. I'll touch on these scenes in sections.

The first scene I really wanted to get headway on was the RR bridge over Highway 395 just outside of the Kettle Falls yard. I had the rough scenery already in, but I thought it was time to put more "life" into it. I really wanted to use static grass on this scene, so being on a budget, I made my own applicator from an electric fly swatter. This was extremely easy to do and it works fairly well. It seems to be a little weak in power, but it gets the job done, just in a little bit more time. Patience is key. Once I got the grass down, I finished the backdrop, trying to match the color on the backdrop to the 3D grass. I also began adding more vegetation to edges of the scene. I still need to add roadway striping.

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PROTOTYPE: Photo by Marty Bernard

Moving further down the line, right after the 395 bridge is the Boise Cascade plywood mill. This scene is nestled in a corner of the room and includes a wood chip loading spur and one for loading the plywood onto centerbeam flat cars, box cars, bulkhead, etc. A scratchbuilt mill building and a pile of logs are up against the backdrop to ease the transition into the painted backdrop. I still have to finish up some details, but overall, this scene is mostly complete.

Last of all, is the big scene encompassing the Columbia River. This section of the layout is about 12 feet long. It includes an 80' timber trestle, the highly compressed scene modeling the area known as Marcus, and a dolomite mine branch(the tunnel). The dolomite mine branch is a spur in the mountain, and is depicting a small branch that went up a few miles up another canyon. There is a tunnel on this branch on the protoype, but what is interesting is that the tunnel is too low for the locomotives to fit through. So, because of this, they had to use other cars from the train that weren't necessarily going to be switched at the mine to be "spacers." I thought this was really interesting, so a low tunnel portal is modeled on the layout to warrant this type of operations. On the prototype, the tunnel is further up the branch, but I didn't have the liberty to do that. In order to delete the "cheesiness," I'll try to hide the tunnel with rock and foliage. This hopefully will turn out pretty neat.

This whole river scene will be very lush, displaying what the Northwest is known for. I'm really excited to see how it will turn out. After weeks of building trees, I might have a realistic result! :)

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AFTER

Here's a few prototype photos. I can't take credit for them. They are just off the internet, but they are shot in places along the line that I'm trying to model in this scene. It shows the photographer's name on the image.