10. Background Players
Building Flats To the Rescue
I've no idea why I hadn't thought of it before... On the evening of 10 March 2021, I was searching for some backdrop images in the hopes of finding an old first-gen one. When I came across one from Peco featuring an industrial town (below), it hit me: make my own background using building flats made from bits of kits I couldn't keep on the layout. My head nearly exploded.
I immediately began tearing apart the big old factory I'd built for the spot now occupied by the gravel works. It then snowballed from there: I also raided the unbuilt single-stall enginehouse kit (Pola B211) for the brick walls.
I started by surrounding what I'd named the yard powerhouse—now reverted back to the factory powerhouse—with various walls from Pola 260 and 262, which offered the benefit of having already been painted mostly and finished. I also pieced together a flat from the Pola B211 single-stall enginehouse I'd wanted to use. The assembled flats are shown above; below, they're seen temporarily posed in position on the layout. Subsequently I decided to omit the sawtooth flat along the left side of the layout.
Lighting
I wound up using all of the fronts and backs of the big Pola factory scene I ditched (all of the "good bits"), as well as all of the brick wall parts from the little enginehouse. For a touch of leavening, I used half of a chopped-down smokestack for latter flat.
Next came the challenge of illuminating them. To keep the flats as thin as possible, I used 1.6mm cool white LEDs, mounted at the top of the window glazing (above). Then I attached a piece of frosted acetate over the glazing with clear double-sided tape (below); this helped spread and diffuse the light.
I wired up all of the LEDs to PC board terminal pad.
Then, after bonding strip styrene around the perimeter of the window areas, I attached a piece of thin black sheet styrene to make a shallow, light-tight enclosure.
It's difficult to photograph the subtle, natural-looking variations in the illumination.
Vegetation
The Tomytec tree kits I was going to use on the layout but never did include a bunch of tree and branch armatures cast in bendable plastic. Upon close inspection, they're very much like DIY twisted wire armatures molded flat, requiring the modeler to bend the branches into 3D shapes before applying the greenery. But the parts being flat from the outset got me thinking: after I'd begun work on the building flats, it dawned on me that the flat tree and branch were perfect for the building parts.
I simply sprayed the branches with spray-cement, and pressed them into a pile of Woodland Scenics Bushes (FC145). After squeezing the ground foam firmly onto the branches to enhance the bond, I applied clear flat spray liberally, glued them to the background building, and called it a day.
To the right of the factory flats, I created a layered, forced-perspective bank of trees.
Mount
Two buildings will be mounted to the layout's back trim panel; here's the first one installed.
The second was added on 18 March 2021.
Sky Backdrop
It's amazing what things cost... unmounted posters of sky backdrops at least four feet in length start around $35 and rocket upward from there. Then I'd need to mount it, and foam board at least four feet in length isn't even worth looking at because of the outrageous prices; worse is shipping. So I did some digging... and found a nice sky image printed on smooth nylon fabric for less than $8. Then I found 24" x 36" self-adhesive foam board for around $12 a sheet; all I had to do was laminate two layers together with the pieces offset to produce a four-foot panel ready for the fabric image. All in all, not bad.
After piecing together the panel, I laid out the fabric in preparation for the slightly tedious process of smoothing the fabric onto the adhesive. It's far from perfect—the foam board joint shows, there are multiple wrinkles, and even a few cat hairs permanently trapped behind the fabric—but then again, the layout is far from perfect anyway. At normal viewing distance, most of the flaws aren't visible, and it photographs quite well.
