Wordless Wednesday #240 - Mill Lead turnout #4

 

Enosburg Falls, 1941 in (Living?) Color

Jack Delano photo, Sep. 1941, Library of Congress, colorized from original black and white. 

 I've been working on drawing up some of the structures for Main Street in Enosburg Falls. Just for fun I ran the Jack Delano photo taken in September 1941 through the MyHeritage colorization app. 

I also ran a photo from an  Enosburg Falls town history that showed the Enosburg Grain Co - about the same time as the Delano image. 

I originally thought the grain company building was painted some sort of "barn red" - but I'm not leaning towards an earth tone or perhaps a slightly browner version of yellow ochre. 

But the one thing I don't trust about the colorizer is the shade of the Shell signs - I would think they should be a much brighter yellow. 

Streeters Store Scenicking

 Work continues on the Streeters Store area of the Junction. 

But what I've really been working on this past week is cleaning up and organizing the workshop area and modeling desk. 

I still have some more sorting/putting stuff away to do before showing photos of the finished result. 

In the meantime, here's a couple more photos of the store!

Wordless Wednesday #239

 

"Planting" the Streeter's Store Scene

It's always amazed me how adding the first round of natural growth, trees, shrubs and the like, completely transforms a scene.  Although in my mind the scene is far from complete, I did manage to find a few minutes in the basement yesterday to add some trees and undergrowth to the section between the St. J crossing and what will be the river crossing - an area I've been calling the "Streeters Store scene."

There's nothing particularly spectacular or noteworthy about the scenery - I used my typical scenery techniques (you can find a relatively complete description of these techniques in the December 2021 issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine). Amazingly I still haven't used up all the trees my parents carefully salvaged from my previous layout - but we're starting to get to the bottom of the barrel so I did prep some more Super Tree armatures earlier this week. 

One note - I used ready mix joint compound for the road. It was easy enough to apply (I did pre-color it with some Bragdon light gray powder) but found the water and thinned white glue soaked into the road and left visible and unrealistic water stains on the road surface. I also found the the joint compound didn't dry rock hard - making it far too easy to gouge it with fingernails or tools. 

I solved both of these issues by adding a thin coat of Ceramic Stucco art compound, which has the added advantage of creating just the slightest texture to the road surface. I still need to do the final chalk weathering and add traffic streaks to the road. The grade crossing is built up from stripwood. The jury is still out on whether to add a working crossing flasher here or not. 

I added an old Campbell water tank kit alongside the mainline just short of the crossing. I have a small MofW shed to add alongside the water tank - and perhaps a small pumphouse.  

In looking over the blog for the past year I realized I've been messing around with this store kit since this time last year - I'm really looking forward to moving on from this scene!