Stone Wall
I've wanted to put some sort of stone wall back behind the lumber yard. I have to keep my Nscale friends off the rails. One thing that is fun for me about working on the layout is trying to come up with clerver/hair-brained ideas for doing something a bit different. In real life the city is working on our street, and when I saw chance-pile of gravel left by the curb, a light bulb came on. Details are below.
Here's the gravel after I scooped it up and washed it in a bucket with water. It's drying in the sun on the patio table.
The gravel was then filtered through different size mesh screens. What looks like sand is perfect for a stone wall in N-scale.
However, before building the wall I decide to cut some round plastic stock to simulate steel posts.
These were dipped into red paint and allowed to dry. At first they looked like kitchen matches, but the paint flattened out when it dried.
The posts were then installed at the end of the street. I'll have to talk to the work crew, as they look pretty crooked to me. At least no cars will end up on the rails.
After the posts were installed I created this plastic "mold" in which to spread the stones for the wall.
After the mold was filled with the stones, a mixture of alcohol and water was applied, followed by several applications of Scenic Cement.
Eventually both supporting sides were trimmed away from the mold.
This yielded a nice layer of rock, glued to a support plastic strip. Perfect!
A bead of foam tack cement was laided out and the wall pinned into place with T-pins. An addition (smaller) bead of foam tack was laid across the top of the wall and more stones were added. Vegetation (ground foam) was planted along the base of the wall.
The end of the wall was hidden with bushes and more stones.
With the lumber yard back in place you can hardly see the wall, but that's okay. I feel better knowing it's there. I honestly don't know if it looks quite right. Maybe a strip of extra coarse sandpaper would have accomplised the same thing. Oh well, it was a good experiment.
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