Railroad Photography Scene - First changes

Another one of those "Aha" moments. I cut out some outlines on graph paper to get an idea of how things might fit and discovered two important points. First, don't pick a scale that is to hard to work with, 3/16ths to the inch is definitely hard to work with. Second, those car floats are big!

Quick change of plans changing the scale to something easier to work with. A 1/4 to the inch is not that much bigger and definitely easier to transfer measurements with. At this point I'm still determined to include the car float and the bridge float. They are just going to need to slide as far to the left side as I can get them. Its either that or stretch out to 4' and that's starting to get more ambitious than I had originally planned for. If I move them further to the right I'm going to run out of space for any kind of foreground building. I may end up widening the whole thing to 20 inches. I checked that and I can squeeze it into the intended space if I re-arrange my space.

At this point I like working with the gatorfoam, Its pretty easy to cut with the x-acto knife with the added benefit of being able to snap it like styrene once you have cut down through the inner foam and scored that back edge once or twice. I'm making up a number of buildings based on measurements from the various manufactures. The bunch I have "finished" are background buildings from Walther's Cornerstone series.

Moving forward!

The new foundation

Throwing together the first building

Mmm, the car float and the float bridge in place on the far right.

Now trying it to the far left

Enough buildings to fill the back. Note that these will be raised up at least 1" maybe 2"

Important information on the back. These are all Cornerstone buildings at this point but I have scoped out some others from N Scale Architect, Monster Modelworks and Itla. I'll be building a few mock ups of those as well.