Scene Planning

The landforms for the inside alcove curve area are complete and everything has an initial coat of "Bargain Bin Tan". Doesn't mean there won't be "tweaks" but it's time to move on to the backdrop as well as the background tree covered hill areas. 
Scenery includes several elements. Color is likely the most critical, but composition - how the elements are positioned relative to one another and the viewer - is also important. So before going any further I wanted to play around with some of the key elements of this scene and make sure they're working.  
I dug out the barn from the last layout - it has some damage that will need to be repaired. Actually, the gutter hanging off doesn't look all that unrealistic! This is a fairly high (a little above my eye level) view of the barn in a position that seemed to look best.  It was quickly obvious that if I'm going to use this particular structure I need to add some additional land under and behind it. I might build a new structure for this spot and use this barn elsewhere. But since any new structure would be about this size I wanted to see how a "box" of this size would look in this position. 

Instead of poking holes for the trees I use small spring clamps to test tree placement. Again, these may not be the trees that get used in these locations - and if you examine the photos carefully you may notice the trees moving around. 

I wanted to check  the angle of the barn compared to the road. I normally would have use a strip of cardstock to represent the road, but didn't have one handy so I used a couple of Sharpies instead to mark the edges of the road. 
More to the point, you can see the difference (and improvement) made by angling the barn slightly between the top and bottom photos. I prefer the bottom one since I think it will offer better photo angles with a train in the distance. 
This scene is actually visible from two spots - inside the curve, and then from the family room side looking at the layout from outside the curve (see the trackplan). So I took a test images showing how the scene might look from the "outside" aisle.