Weekend Report

Had a fun-filled model railroad weekend. Started off early Saturday morning, when about three dozen modelers from Northern Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania gathered at the club house in our neighborhood to listen to Steve King and his two-part Timetable and Train Order clinic. 
After the clinic the crowd broke for lunch, and I hightailed it the block or so to our house to prepare for an open house for those same clinic attendees. 
The open house went well. I got comments, some obviously tongue-in-cheek, others not, about why I didn't fill the other 2/3rds or so of the basement with railroad. Obviously, those folks haven't been reading this blog for any length of time. Or perhaps my reasoning (SEE HERE) wasn't as obvious to them as it is to me? 
Highlight for me was having Lance "approve" of my execution of his design - and he agreed the addition of the East Berkshire scene in place of a staging yard was an improvement. 
So good things, all around. 
After the open house I kept working on the standing seam roof on the implement dealer. I'll have a more detailed follow up on that project sometime later this week. 
Sunday morning involved some household chores, but by mid afternoon I was able to head downstairs and work some more on the roof, and even started blocking in some basic backdrop painting (primarily a horizon line and some far distant hills. 
One thing I learned from the last layout is backdrops are much easier to deal with, both in the creation and photographing of them, if they are kept very subtle, and the horizon line is kept extremely low (you can barely see the penciled-in horizon line in the photo on the right). Then I blocked in the distant hills and some clouds (see below). At this point it seems like the horizon is taller than it should be, but when foreground scenery elements are added the visible horizon line will be lower than it might appear at this early stage. 

I went as far as using a couple of average height trees to ensure the horizon wasn't taller than the trees in most places, and spent a fair amount of time looking at the layout from an HO scale persons eye level to ensure the hills weren't extending above the top of structures and the like.
More to follow. And, if this doesn't work out, it's a simple matter to erase it with a coat of blue paint!