Today I started the beginning of installing the scenery for the major portion of the layout, it’s taken quite a awhile to get back into the zone, and it’s not as straight forward as just slapping down some gravel, dirt and a few trees.
For me, getting it to look like it should in real life is a constant factor, and I often spend the majority of time planning things like the Right Of Way (ROW), parking areas, grade crossings, drainage ditches, earth cuts, and a myriad of prototypical features, and how all those also react & blend in with structures.
The gravel roads, dirt, earth contours, tree placement really come together once you have the basics in place.
Another thing I also do is take a few photos from HO scale eye level view, and an overhead aerial view. This can often give an idea of how a scene will look, and can often highlight issues that you normally wouldn’t view from just an operating perspective view.
This area at Carlisle Junction is a huge focal point for the layout, in fact it’s a signature scene for the entire layout. It’s the first view of the main & largest section of the layout, it’s “the” major interchange between the operation portion and the “rest of the world” (staging) and also connects the locomotive facility & Rutherford Yard, and leads into the York Haven - Pulp & Paper Mill, the largest industry on the layout.
Some of the best layout scenery I’ve seen has the ability to draw your eye right into the scene, it’s not just something in the foreground, it has depth & detail all the way through from foreground to background. And it has some really great scenes for photographing, another reason I’ll take photos to see what perspective a scene can offer.
The example below shows the interlocking tower at the Junction, the eye level shot shows what a operator will be looking at when watching for a train to exit staging via the helix/locomotive facility, and using the tower as a small view block. Then when looking left (aerial shot) you can see the view heading into the Shippensburg Classification Yard. This is what I try and achieve, something that will draw the eye in, and something that looks like it would occur, and/or be in the real world.
My layout isn’t prototypical exactly, not by a long shot, it loosely follows the areas & era of the Reading & surrounding railroads that interchanged with it, but everything else, like the scenery is purely my interpretation of what I think works for the early 70’s...
