Thanks again for the compliments, guys!
Ok, for those keeping score at home, I have a 12-story building under construction, need to wire-in the small town structures into the main power harness, and am working on another building for outside downtown. I'm still slowly progressing on those projects, but have focused recent energy on finally building out the trailer park across the aisle from the small town. I'll try and step through this chronologically as I go through building out the trailer park area itself, a couple p-ville trailers, and a caboose:
First, I needed a way to hide the base of the trailer park-adjacent water tower so it's not just sitting on the layout surface. Routing a slot into the base of a foam "rock" worked well. I will later cover the top if this base with foliage or rocks:
Within the trailer park itself, I have 3 Woodland Scenics trailers, 2 MTH trailers (lightly modified and upgraded), and a caboose (which will serve as the "office"). Here is a test mock-up of how everything would fit:
I have leftover kits for 2x plasticville trailers as well (I used the third one in the kit to make a houseboat, currently elsewhere on the layout). Since there is room, I am building these (and attempting to super-detail them) as well. Here you see them being prepped for painting:
Here's the sign for the trailer park. As with most of my signs, it is gloss sticker paper stuck to styrene and cut out. Sign is front-lit by a Evan Designs micro LED, base is made of scrap wood and plastic:
The caboose sits a little high in the mock-up, so I routed a slot into the foam for the track to sit lower:
...much better:
The caboose itself is an 80's K-line model, so I am also doing some work on it to make it more detailed and add some realism. Here, I have disassembled it, clear-coated it, and begun painting detail parts:
Here are the two new trailers after the first round of paint. One will be teal/cream, the other silver/red:
Inside the caboose, I installed black posterboard to block the light so that interior lighting doesn't give me a "glowing caboose" effect. Here it is on the roof part way through install:
Teal trailer with stripes added. I used styrene strips to ensure they are sharp and clean - I can't hand paint this precisely:
Used paint markers to do the tail lights, and printed a license plate (with apologies to Lone Star):
Trailers after round 2 of painting - the roofs are now silver on top:
Here is the trailer park area itself, with the road and parking spots all mapped out:
First step was to create the sand parking pads. I used white glue and dyed play sand:
I decided to make bases/skirts for the p-ville trailers to up the realism. Here you can see they are made out of wood dowels:
...and that the trailer bottom fits right into it:
Sand being done, here is the area for the road masked off with tape:
...and with the asphalt applied. I tried out the "Eric's Trains Triple Whammy" technique of mixing fine black cinders with white glue. I'm definitely a fan of this approach!
Here it is with tape removed... hopefully I won't find any cat paw prints in this later, lol:
...and, finally, here is a trailer base on the skit with faux-stone cover added. Not too shabby!
...more to come!
