Owned By: Bob T
Built By: Kent Smiley
Description: Texture Town
This module came about after a visitor to one of our shows at Fairfax Station donated a number of buildings and rolling stock to the club. The clubs policy is to offer it to members first before offering them to the wider public through train show sale tables and eBay. Some of the buildings left over I saw some potential for a couple of techniques I wanted to try. First was the Open Frame T-Trak module base design and the second was the use of textures printed on a home printer used as road, sidewalk, grass and gravel surfaces.
The Open Framework I saw on the T-Trak Wikidot tutorials page and it looked very doable for my meagre woodworking tools and skillset. I had a sharp hand saw, power drill, drill bits, clamps, wood screws, ruler, square and miter box plus some left over dressed 2x1’s so decided to give it a go. It’s a single, 365mm deep. I cut 4 2x1’s to 308 mm wide for the base pieces and track supports. I then cut another 2 for the 365mm side pieces. The front, back and side pieces were clamped together square and screw holes pre-drilled before attaching with 2 screws at each corner checking it for squareness at every step. I then drilled 4 holes at each corner for the #20 leveling screws our cub uses to hit our 4” height standard along with T-nuts. I then added the track supports on top of the open frame. I used 1” pink foamboard from Home Depot. It was called project board and came in a 2’ x 2’ x 1” sheet. Notice it comes up over the level of the track base which is what I was after for this scene. Being foam, I could have sanded it down to meet the track base if needed. See the pictures for how it all went together.
The buildings were made by someone else.
The textures for the road, depot and diner parking lot, gravel for the freight station, and grass behind the buildings are all downloaded, manipulated, stitched together and printed on regular printer paper at home, and glued down with a glue stick. There are a few things I might do differently, like putting driving ramps into the Diner parking lot. The Diner building had a very thick base so was difficult to blend in at ground level.
Overall, it was a good learning experience and I got to try a new method of doing roads and other flat surfaces. Our club has an annual auction each year and this will be part of it.