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Layout Overview Archive

For visitors who might enjoy seeing the layout's progress, here are the prior overview shots, going back to August 2008 when I started taking them.

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21 September 2010: Naughtright has seen significant progress, with many buildings having been completed, including and in particular the East Theater.

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5 August 2010: Naughtright was significantly rearranged (again), and a number of structures were completed, while many others moved further along.

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25 February 2010: The rural side of the layout is now done—a significant accomplishment!

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7 February 2010: With Landsend Farm finished, the rural side of the layout quickly nears completion. Owing to the planned sale of the layout, changes were made to the arrangement of buildings in Naughtright, along the back right edge of the layout.

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19 November 2009: Considerably more finished scenery is apparent in this view, particularly to the right of the cornfield and behind Stephen A. Greene Building Supply. Also, the crossing shanty has returned to the Canal Street grade crossing.

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15 October 2009: Once again, the progress is barely visible at the scale of this view. Dot's Diner is completed and installed, the Stephen A. Greene Building Supply is nearly re-finished, and the parking area around the Naughtright Passenger Station is done. I'm also experimenting with a mirror at the far end of the riverbed.

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7 September 2009: Although barely visible in this view, the newly-relocated Dot's Diner is in the process of being installed, to the left of the new stand of trees at the right front corner of the layout. Also, Stephen A. Greene Building Supply (near dead center, foreground) is in the midst of a radical redesign.

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25 August 2009: The only obvious change to the layout from the prior shot was the addition of streets to the town of Naughtright. Then, up close you'd see that the area around the coal trestle was completely reworked. I've also switched back to an older backdrop, as I think I like it better than the newest one.

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7 July 2009: With the prior month spent mostly on detail items and animation, such as the barber pole and the N scale layout, the overall look of the layout still hasn't changed much. The new backdrop photo is mounted and in place, but I can't decide if I like it as much now as I did before.

30 April 2009

13 June 2009: Much of the work recently has been on models, such as the MP-15DC and the Front Street Bank, so there haven't been any significant changes to the overall layout cosmetics, aside from a new batch of trees behind the bridge. I do have a new backdrop photo, but it hasn't been mounted yet.

30 April 2009

30 April 2009: Once again flipped around, the layout is at long last seeing the completion of the Naughtright access panel. This comes as a result of moving the town to the right (left in this view) about an inch to create space for a better tunnel portal configuration on the lower line. Cast resin stone wall parts, roughly center foreground, are about to be chopped up to create retaining walls around the portal.

22 March 2009

22 March 2009: Possibly at its messiest, the layout is seen here in the midst of getting greenery and such around the newly-installed Stephen A. Greene & Sons Building Supply main building, dead-center foreground (with the entire town of Naughtright displaced to the hill on the other side of the river).

1 March 2009

1 March 2009: Naughtright has suffered yet another significant round of design changes—see the first entry on this news archive page for the gory details.

13 December 2008

13 December 2008: With the cornfield finished, scenery is spreading up the hill like wildfire—comparatively speaking; consider that, in the past, periods of months have gone by where there has been no visual evidence of progress on the layout itself. I was inspired to see how things looked through the lens of a "real" camera (as opposed to the pocket camera I use for documentation purposes, such as these shots), and the result is in the gallery.

5 December 2008

5 December 2008: A big block of scenery has been added in this view: the rockwork on the rural access panel is done. It's pretty easy to see the new rock—because it's fresh and has not cured, it's much darker than the rest.

21 November 2008

21 November 2008: If things look a little odd in this view, that's because I've flipped the layout around in order to work on scenery elements at the back of the layout—specifically the rock castings for the access panel. As a result of this move, I made a fun little discovery.

28 September 2008

28 September 2008: With work proceeding on some of the town structures, I did a quick photo study to make sure everything fit together aesthetically. In particular, I was concerned that the theater (second building from the right) might have gotten too large. Placed together with the other structures, it does appear somewhat chunky, but it's acceptable. See Emma's for another, closer view.

11 September 2008

11 September 2008: The star of today's image is a new sky backdrop. Like its predecessor, it's a poster (ordered online from AllPosters) spray-mounted on Foamcore. I'd planned from the beginning to have a series of sky backdrops on hand to add a variety of moods to photographs of the layout. However, due to the high cost of these posters ($75+), I've not been able to invest in as many backdrops as I'd like to have, so I spent a considerable amount of time carefully choosing one that would make a nice contrast to the admittedly oversaturated ultramarine sky that was my first pick; in particular, I was looking for a sky with features that would add more depth to the scene. Also visible in this shot is a stand of trees in the foreground, subject of a couple of gallery images, and the now-finished crossing shanty.

30 August 2008

30 August 2008: I've been tremendously excited to be able to start putting greenery on the layout. Thus the layout is littered with piles of various scenery materials, along with glue, tweezers, and the ever-present reading glasses. In front of the bottle of superglue, Naughtright Passenger Station is sitting proudly on its platform, complete with gooseneck lamps. You can also see the half-finished crossing shanty to the right of the passenger station. To the right, the retaining wall and tunnel portal are installed on the recently-rebuilt access panel.

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