Photo 2: A closer view, about four feet to the near edge Photo 1: the photo backdrop of the River Crossing scene, viewed from in front of the Riverside Station scene (i.e., from about eight feet away). I have many, many, hours of work yet to do there, someday, but it looks fairly good (at least to me, as compared with the pink scenery I've been looking at for the past eight months on an objective scale, I'll admit it looks pretty rough). So the end result is that while the "River Crossing Scene" is a long way from done, I've banished all the pink foam from sight under a layer of paint, and all of the structures are roughed in, one way or another. The eventual "final" image will be printed on a heavier coated stock (I'm thinking of "presentation" paper, which is coated and heavier than ordinary paper, but much lighter than "photo" paper), and will likely be printed on a photo-inkjet printer for best color rendition. It actually looks pretty good, although I expect the tape won't stay stuck very long (my foam-core expressway has had the details I taped to it falling off since about a week after it was built). This test image was simply printed on ordinary paper using a color laser printer, and taped to the backdrop with double-sided Scotch tape. Blown up to 4-feet wide, with an effective resolution of 64 dpi, it's a bit blotchy up close, but looks pretty good from several feet away. The one I've used, a view from Himeji Castle isn't even of Tokyo, but I like it well enough that I'll probably end up using it for the final image. But first I need to test the concept, and see how a likely image looks. The idea is to cover some/all of my blue backdrops with photos found online (I'm sticking to ones with Creative Commons licenses that allow derivative works), which I'll enlarge, print onto letter-size sheets of paper (good photo paper) and glue to the backdrop. The plywood will eventually be hidden within the real expressway.Īnd I've finally gotten around to my first test of a photographic backdrop, something I've been planning from "day 1", but never found time for before. I also built the support structure for the expressway (I can't recall if I'd mentioned that before), which is 1/4" threaded rod holding up a plywood base, with 1" PVC pipe around it to make it look like a concrete post. That's still early days yet, but I'm hoping to have real progress by next weekend, as I'm on vacation (it's a "stay home and catch up on things" vacation, and there should be some time for railroad work in there).īut in addition I've been plugging away at the River Crossing scene, painting the foam of the hillside, and working on the roof for the subway (basically a few sheets of 2mm styrene that had to be cut to fit the foam, and then painted). I had a bit of fun running trains (no new video), before I put paper and masking tape over the just-completed subway track and began getting messy on the Riverside Station scene. It's been a couple of weeks, time for an update.