Wordless Wednesday #196 - Layout Video Update July 2018

Click HERE for a link to monthly layout update.

Move out complete - 1/2 there ...

I snapped this picture Tuesday night just before I turned off the lights for the last time:

You can't even tell there was a model railroad in here just a few months ago. 
It's been a crazy week of moving the last few items out of the house and into the apartment (if you've ever wondered how much stuff you can cram into a small apartment, the answer is a lot more than you might think!). Wednesday morning we closed escrow on the house, turned over the keys and were feeling pretty good about things. 
That is until our realtor sent us a note thanking and congratulating us, adding "just think, you're half way through the move!"
Ugh, that's right - we still have to move out of the apartment and into the new house. I suspect that will be less of a hassle - we've learned in the last six weeks that we're too old and set in our ways for apartment building life.  
In the meantime, I'll stop the moving and new house updates on here since they're not really model railroad related. 
I will, if anyone is interested, write about the layout design process. 

Blog Notes: 
After considering what to do with this blog I've decided to keep it pretty much as is for now. 
I spent some time the last couple of evenings adding a "Manassas Layout" label to any post that was specific to the old layout. I also deleted any truly outdated posts (things like "I'm having an open house this weekend ..." etc. ) To see every post on the layout I was building, and rebuilding, from 2009 until now, click on the "Manassas Layout" label at the bottom on this post. 

Bye Bye Bye ....

After spending several hours hauling bits of wood up to the garage, and planning to rent a pickup up truck and make several trips to the dump,  I opted to solve the problem of removing the layout from the basement the American way and throw money at it. So first thing this morning this appeared in the driveway -

Add "cost of having a junk hauling company remove the layout from the basement and haul it off" to the list of things that cost more with a large layout. Less than an hour after they arrived what had started life as my "dream layout" looked like this:

I am still rather depressed about the whole thing, so I'm going to stop here and say this hereby closes the book on what will be from now on referred to as "the last layout."

Status Report - 3 June 2017

After a long day in the basement, disassembly of the peninsula is complete. Next step is getting the remnants upstairs and out to the garage. 
The massive amount of wood currently leaning against the walls and piled on the floor present the perfect argument for smaller, simpler layouts! 
Ugh, none of this was any fun, but having a good friend over to help at least made it seem to go a little faster! And we did enjoy a nice lunch trackside in Old Town Manassas - where we discussed plans for the next railroad! 
Thanks Stic!

Lessons Learned

An important lesson all sailors learn in bootcamp - ways to stop water from getting into the people tank.

Lessons Learned are a big thing in my work life.  We’re perpetually looking at things that didn’t go as planned (and even those that did) in an effort to identify and repeat the things that worked and to avoid repeating those times, as one of my old bosses was fond of saying “The water got into the people tank.”*

So, although I was pleased with the layout’s scenery and performance (once the initial teething pains were worked through) I find myself asking if the layout was “successful?”

The stated purpose of the railroad was to “model the equipment, structures, operations and setting of the Central Vermont Railway in the late steam-to-diesel transition era.” 
Measured against that standard, I’m not sure the railroad didn't fall short.
Here's just a few of the lessons learned:

Focus: I need more of it, and I need to stick with something once I drive the stake in the ground. "Modeling the Central Vermont of the 1950s..." is a large canvas. As I've relayed in this blog, I started modeling the Southern Division of the railroad on a double deck layout, then tried to shoehorn White River Junction and the Northern Division (with it's larger engines) into a single-deck railroad, only to later remove WRJ and install Essex in its place. The basic footprint of the layout never really changed all that much, but I think we built, and rebuilt, every section of the layout at least twice. 

My approach to layout design?

In essence, I was chasing the ever illusive squirrel - the hope of a "perfect" layout design to overlay on my theme. In the end, "perfection" became the enemy of decisiveness. That's all on me, and I truly appreciate the grace and tolerance shown by my friends throughout all this! 

Modeling the Operations:  In general, the individual operating sessions were a success (I always had a good time).  But let’s look at it from the viewpoint of return on investment.
I started construction of the layout in December, 2008.  It took several years of building (and yes, rebuilding) the layout.  In total, I ended up hosting 17 “official” operating sessions throughout the railroad’s 8.5 years of existence.  That’s averages out to a session about every 7 months.  An aside, if you really want to depress yourself, consider the following formula:

Total Cost of the Layout (in $) / Total # of Sessions = Cost/per session ($) 

No matter how it's broken down, it doesn’t seem like the time, effort, and money to build the layout was worth it when you consider the total time spent performing its main function was a fraction of the time it existed.

We didn't operate as much as I'd hoped, but Christine made sure no one left hungry!

Modeling the Equipment:  It’s great fun to tell yourself you’re going to model the railroad’s operations, six or seven towns, complete with scratchbuilt replicas of all the buildings, and run through them trains populated by accurate, detailed cars pulled by equally accurately detailed locomotives.

If you asked me what my favorite part of the hobby is I’d tell you it's building detailed freight cars. 

The one resin car I've gotten built in the last 24 months...and it's not even lettered yet!

If that's the case then why I have gotten exactly one – that’s one – resin car kit built in the last two years?
 Instead of doing what I wanted to do when I wanted to do it, I’ve been stuck in a do-loop of sorts - “feeding the monster” – that large layout looming in the basement that required track, wiring, static grass, structures, trees (my God, the trees!), in massive quantities.  I kept telling myself I’d get the thing to “looking finished” and then turn my attention to the projects I wanted to work on.  But there was always another bunch of trees to install – or some piece of track to ballast.

I'll conclude with this. I'm not "down" on large layouts. I'm also not "down" on small layouts, or anything really. I don't think  the layout was an absolute failure. I had fun, shared some good times with friends, perfected some techniques and learned a lot about myself. My purpose in writing this is not discourage anyone else from pursuing their approach to the hobby (Lord knows, the above isn’t going to encourage anyone to do anything other than take up knitting!). Instead, I'm trying to quantify the good and bad and hopefully apply those lessons learned to the next railroad. 
 *To get the joke it helps to understand he was a submariner. And the #1 rule of all submariners is to keep the water out of the people tank…(Hey, it’s not my line, submariners are weird, everyone knows it.)

Layout Tear Down Status Report - As of 1 June 2017

Hope all took some time to reflect over the past weekend on what the holiday is really about.

Thanks to a (seemingly) never-ending string of rain storms passing through the area I've not yet started on my deck staining chore.  I did turn my attention to starting removal of the layout from the basement. Currently, the "barn curve" - a scene that I think came out pretty well, is sitting in the garage in 5 or 6 pieces awaiting a trip to the landfill.

Attempts to part out sections or pieces of the layout, even interest in basic components like 1 x 4s and the like, have fallen on deaf ears, or became too difficult to coordinate (I can't store this stuff indefinitely waiting for someone to come out and decide if they want to take any of it or not!). So, I opted to make it easy on myself and, once the layout scraps are in the garage, everything will go to the dump.

In addition to the lobe end of the peninsula I've started removing the around-the-walls sections of the benchwork. The rest of the peninsula, which involves removing the backdrop and supporting structure, will wait until the weekend when I have some additional hands available. I expect the basement will be devoid of model railroad by the middle of next week.

On the positive side I've been doing more sketching and thinking about the next layout (hey, it makes the drudgery of tear out seem like hobby time, I guess!). I'm still leaning - very hard - towards the Richford Branch theme. Some have expressed concern that this would be "too limiting" and not offer enough variety, require enough operators, or otherwise wouldn't be worth the effort. I do see the point, but in my mind, these limitations are precisely what makes it appealing. 

Dismantling commenced

From this:

To this:
Total elapsed time, about two hours. 
Because of how it was built, and rebuilt, this area had some of the most "complex" benchwork. I think taking the rest of the layout out will go even faster. 
They always come out A LOT faster than they go in....
Thinking about the next layout makes the process a little easier. 

Layout tear-down update

Thanks to all who have written individually or posted to the blog. I've been in the middle of a big project at work, and moving is well, all consuming, so I haven't been able to respond to all the notes, posts, comments, etc... Here's a quick rundown on where this project currently sits:
- The layout is still in place, but not for much longer. Thanks to my folks visiting last weekend and looking to help, the railroad is now devoid of trees ... most of the fall trees have been packed away for possible reuse. My dad proved to be quite the logger....

- Monday my folks helped me pack up my workshop - so the lathe, milling machine, scratchbuilding material etc... are all boxed up and ready to go into temporary storage. First, I have to haul all those (heavy) boxes upstairs!
- Over the course of the last couple of weeks of evenings I managed to pack up all the all the cars, locomotives, and structures, etc...
- All the salvageable track (ie. any track without ballast) has been removed from the layout. Any pieces of code 70 track longer than 2 feet have been bundled and packed away. All others bits and pieces of track, broken turnouts, etc...went to the curb. 
Next step will be the worst - removing the layout framework itself. That's on the docket for next couple of weekends...

Wordless Wednesday #154 "Reflections"

Petition to Abandon the Line

I had the pleasure of hosting an open house for the NMRA Potomac Division last Saturday. Considering this was the nicest weekend weather-wise we've had in about a month, I was pleasantly surprised by how many members (36 in total, according to the sign-in sheet) stopped by to see the railroad.
John Paganoni manned the check in desk upstairs, which allowed Christine to escape. Stic ran the trains back and forth (and back and forth). He seemed to be having a good time. Beauregard and Molly opted to go to Doggie Day Care for the afternoon, although they did have a chance to visit with Stic when they got home.

Just before the open house I posted the following notice on the layout fascia -

This layout's days are numbered - in fact I spent some time yesterday putting cars and locomotives back in their boxes, in preparation for the scrapper's train that is expected to show up sometime next week. I'll start by removing the around the walls portion of the layout, keeping the peninsula in place for a short while longer in order to have it evaluated for the NMRA Scenery Merit Award.

While some consideration was given to salvaging portions of the railroad, it seems much more logical to simply clean sheet the thing. So, with the exception of Williams Creek, which is a small section on it's own framework, the rest of the layout will be broken down to its basic components - with a lot of it going to the curb.



NCE system up and running

Beer poster in lieu of photo of Gainesville DCC install crew. 

The Gainesville Mafia, headed by Don Pete LaGuardia, (a.k.a "The Electrician," a.k.a. "Wires", a.k.a. "Watts") stopped by last night to assist with the installation and checkout of my North Coast Engineering Wireless DCC system. 
Understandably, they don't like having their pictures taken so it worked out well that my phone battery was dead. So to have some sort of graphic with this post I've added a vintage beer poster. Enjoy....
We'd planned on a long evening in case of the need for troubleshooting. I'm happy to report the installation of the system, which includes three power districts, each with their own booster and a Tony's Train Exchange short circuit detector, went flawlessly and the system was up and running in record time. 
Thanks to Pete, Mat, Tom, and Brian for their assistance. It was much appreciated!

Essex Junction Backdrop update

Bernie came by for a short, but productive session on Sunday. His main tasker was to complete the Main Street backdrop scene in Essex Junction.  As you might recall, back in January, he came over and started to do a computer drawing of the buildings along one side of Main Street (essentially south east of the trainshed). Before he left that day we printed out a size test version of to make sure the scale and perspective would work and he finished up the drawing at home.

Yesterday he showed up with the final drawing and his bucket of backdrop paints and an assortment of brushes. He dove right into painting the background foliage and distant treeline. We’re keeping the horizon line fairly low in this section of the layout since it represents a relatively flat town.

Instead of cutting out the buildings entirely, he actually painted the sidewalks, and some bushes and grass texture onto the paper.  This proved pretty effective.

Then he cut out the printed sky from the upper portion of the printed buildings, sprayed the back of the paper with photo adhesive, and placed it on the backdrop. 

After blending the road coloration, and adding some leafless “foreground” trees, I think the finished section of backdrop looks pretty good (the 3-d structures shown here are strictly stand ins!)  Next step is on me to finish the three-dimensional scenery in the foreground, and add the “real” structures to both sides of the street to not only get the right look but to hide the edges of the backdrop section, and add the foreground foliage.

That has to wait until I finish the tracklaying/wiring in this area. While Bernie was working on his art project (and after he took off), I managed to get the track complete from north staging to the trainshed.  Over the last couple of weeks I’ve handlaid a half dozen or so turnouts in Essex Junction, so it should be a simple matter to “connect the dots” with the rest of the track. 

Where (might) we be heading (maybe)?

As I mentioned before about a year ago I removed the White River Junction scene from the layout - it was simply too cramped in the space to effectively capture the look and function of the prototype. 
Despite rumors to the contrary, I do think through things before I start tearing into the layout, even if I don't draw up lots of detailed plans. 
White River Junction is a perfect example of that. I have several of the key structures completed, so it's merely a matter of finding a place for the scene that makes the most sense. 
When you descend the stairs into the basement and look straight ahead you're looking at the longest, straightest wall in the basement - one with no obstructions along it's entire 30+ foot length. Seems to me THAT'S the best place to put a long, skinny, and relatively straight scene such as White River Junction. 
Here's a quick sketch worked up from the White River Junction elements in Bernie's book. (This same plan also shows where Essex Junction fits in). Obviously this isn't a full track plan but it will give you an idea of how the pieces could fit together - rather effectively I think. 
Two things - I'll likely build this scene as a series of Free-Mo compatible module sections with the idea that it would be easy to move it or sell it at some point. 
Secondly, don't be looking for construction to start anytime soon - I made a commitment to the better half that the existing layout will look "finished" before adding any more benchwork to the space!

Track gang reaches Essex Junction

The track gang has reached the outskirts of Essex Junction, Vt. Of course, Essex is situated on the former site of White River Jct. so perhaps this post should be titled "Track Gang reaches this corner of the basement....again."
I've spent a number of hours over the last few weeks of evenings finalizing the Essex track arrangement. While there will be some compromises from the prototype I believe it captures the spirit and look of the place. 
Commercial turnouts, even "curved" Micro-Engineering no. 6 turnouts, don't allow for a fluid enough geometry to look right and maximize the track arrangement so I'm planning on hand laying a fair number of turnouts in this section - the first of these is shown here - a curved no. 6 (and 3/4 or so!) left hand. One leg will form part of the Essex junction yard/wye trackage, the other leg will be the lead through the fence and into Fort Ethan Allen. (note the photo was taken before the throw rod was installed!) 

Inspiration and a clear path

While my approach to building, and rebuilding, my layout has given me a reputation of taking the “Ready, Fire, Aim!” approach, that’s not really accurate. 

Think things through before taking action, lest you find

yourself in an untenable situation.

I tend to approach designing layouts by defining a particular location in the basement where a specific scene will go, and then design and build that scene before moving to the next.  There is an inherent risk here – you can quickly end up with a finished layout where all the various segments don’t necessarily function together as a cohesive whole either operationally or visually.
The subject of much discussion on this blog, and in private emails with some of my friends, has centered on the section of the railroad where the White River Jct. yard had been located.  Although I’d made some modifications to the area it really wasn’t working (I won’t dwell on those issues here, as “whys” have been discussed ad nauseam in previous posts).
Prior to the inclusion of White River, the original plan layout design called for some form of Essex Junction, Vermont, certainly a CV signature scene, in this area. I ended building a version of Essex at the other end of the modeled railroad (Essex Junction v1.0?). This was subsequently removed when the neck of the peninsula was rearranged earlier this year). Through most of the summer and fall, while things have progressed well on the other end of the layout, I couldn’t really get the plan for Essex Jct. v2.0 to “gel.”  The solution, I thought, was to forego Essex and all its appeal entirely and instead include a “yard” (you know, since model railroads apparently have to include a “yard” if for no other reason to give the yardmaster something to do).
I worked diligently on designing this new yard over the course of several weeks starting back in the early spring.  Luckily, I realized what a mistake it was before committing to actually building the thing.  Prototype yards, even small ones, are massive.  Model railroad yards tend to be fairly imperfect depictions of the prototype - 90% of the time we basically fill a shelf with parallel tracks.  I was in real danger of simply repeating the issues I had with the White River yard in slightly modified form.  Unlike the other sections of the railroad, this would have forever looked like nothing more than a shelf full of parallel tracks at best, or at worst some sort of out-of-place appendage to the rest of the railroad.  It would do nothing to complete the picture.
So there this section of the layout sat, a sea of bare homasote awaiting some inspiration.
That inspiration arrived a few months ago in the form of some layout photos from Neil Schofield, showing his scene at Orleans, Vt. You can see one of them (taken by Neil and used with his kind permission) below.

Orleans, Vt., in HO scale as modeled by Neil Schofield.  N. Schofield photo, used with permission.

What inspiration could I draw for my transition era CV from a scene showing a street running in front of a couple of stores and clearly set in a different era?  Turns out, plenty of inspiration. Although there’s no denying the wonderful job Neil is doing creating his vision of upstate Vermont in the 1980s, what I found most inspiring was the sense of place they evoked and the way the prototype is driving the modeled railroad. 

A Google street view of the scene Neil has modeled.

This sent me back to the layout to determine if perhaps I gave up on Essex Junction too quickly, dismissing it as “too hard” to fit in my space.  I’ll likely do another blog post with more details on Essex Junction v2.0, but essentially the scene has two “sections” – the trainshed/station area, and a couple of blocks away a wye with several industries inside it and alongside it.  I know there’s an effective way to model the “wye” – simply leave off one leg of the thing.  After all, that’s exactly what I did with Essex when it was located on the other side of the basement.



Kurt Thompson works the Essex Junction switcher job in Essex Jct. v1.0. A workable track arrangement that captured the look of the prototype, it lacked room for the structures themselves so wouldn’t ever visually capture the look of the prototype.

The crews that operated "Essex 1.0" found it was an enjoyable job with the right blend of action and down time.  If I duplicated the basic approach to a "two-legged wye" in the new location for Essex I found I could include many of the buildings that had to be left out of Essex 1.0.

That's perhaps the biggest inspiration I got from Neil's photos. His railroad is firmly in context with the other elements that make the scene recognizable. I suppose he could have included a spur and yet another place for his crews to switch, but the resulting scene would have looked model railroad and not created the same sense of place.

Thanks Neil. I feel like I've gotten over a bad head cold!

Work Session Report - April 9, 2016

Very productive work session last Saturday. Stic came over and we got an early start (and actually got right to work...). 
Honestly, I've been dragging a bit on the layout over the last few weeks. I have been busy though. I've gone through numerous boxes of stuff and gotten rid of everything from old household papers (the shredder got such a workout it literally started smoking!), various pieces of wood, old VHS tapes, magazines, and even some half-started projects that will now never see the light of day. Sometimes you need to completely clean house.  
Anyway, if it seems like I haven't been blogging about layout progress lately that's the reason. Entirely necessary but hardly interesting enough to blog about! 
Back to Saturday. First of all, I appreciate Stic coming by, if for no other reason than it helped get me rolling again. Besides, Beauregard and Molly like him....
Plan for the day was to finish some benchwork alterations that involve adding a turntable and small engine house to what had been the town of Randolph and will now be a town based (in spirit, if not details!) on Montpelier Junction. Montpelier Junction didn't have a turntable at the time I'm modeling. I don't have room for a wye but I do have a nicely completed Diamond Scale turntable. The turntable came off my SNE #1 layout (see MRP 2000) and is still sitting in the piece of 3?4" plywood sub roadbed for that layout. The turntable "unit" is about 18" square and almost 12" deep (to accommodate the New York Railway Supply drive unit) so 
fitting it in place required some benchwork alterations beyond simply cutting out a circle. In classic Tom Sawyer fashion I convinced Stic into doing all the kneeling, bending etc... (see photo below) under and between the benchwork joists. 

Q: Do I feel guilty about this? 
A: No, I don't feel guilty about it. 
Not even a little bit. 

By the end of the day we'd gotten the turntable planted in the layout and had worked out the track and structure arrangement that seems to work best. Can't wait to get the track laid in this area and finally get some scenery down. 

Grassing things up - and some outbuildings for Mr Griffith's farm

I'm awaiting some additional material to finish the dam for the mill stream so instead of working on the mill stream itself I've been spending some time with the static grass applicator over the last few days. 
Some areas of the layout hadn't gotten static grass applied - in some others, like this section just north of Randolph, the static grass had gotten pretty beaten up during the course of building, and rebuilding the layout. 
A quick squirt of hairspray, a misting with water to create some relative humidity, and a few minutes with the static grass applicator and the refreshed grass (left) looks much better than the old, dusty faded stuff (right):

I also planted some grass around the highway underpass just north of Waterbury - this is right at the end of the peninsula and is one of the first scenes visitors see when coming downstairs. For some reason I'd never "grassed" the embankments on both sides of the railroad overpass - so while I had the static grass applicator out I took care of this area. 

I had several visitors from Richmond yesterday - Mike Garber, Mike Pulaski and Joshua Blay stopped by and we had a nice visit. They arrived during this static grass party - Mike G. and Joshua hadn't tried using static grass so we had an impromptu hands-on clinic. They did some grass around the Derby & Ball wood yard - they did a great job. I hope they picked up a useful tip or two! 

I also realized that I'd never mentioned the outbuildings I've been adding to Griffiths Farm. In addition to the hay barn, "Ol' Man Griffith" now has a corn crib and a small tractor shed. Looks like there's some activity in the barn yard. (As a side note, I need to clean up my modeling desk!)

The last stretch of static grass I've done is along the mill stream - which I'll show in a future post - and in the area behind the curve between the mill stream scene and Randolph. Since this was in the background I was careful to use the shorter (2mm and 4mm) grass instead of the long stuff I tend to use in the foreground scenes. 

Down By the Old Mill Stream: 4 (aka "I'm baaaccckkk baby!")

Rather than a long detailed explanation as to why I haven't done much posting for the last month and a half, I'll simply say the entirely necessary but seemingly never-ending work project is at last finished. 
I feel a little like one of the late 20th century's most brilliant philosophers....

My oldest son Jeff came up to visit for about a week. We (Jeff, myself, my youngest son Matthew, and Bernie Kempinski) took in all the sights (sounds...and smells...) of the Great Scale Model Train Show in Timonium on Saturday. We also headed over to M B Klein's where I added a new Broadway Limited 2-8-0 to the roster - a planned phased replacement of the fleet of Bachmann Spectrum Connies that are starting to show their age. I drove, and we couldn't simply drop Bernie off without peering in his basement to monitor his progress. So we spent a pleasant couple of hours seeing what he was up to - as fascinating as always. Jeff even managed to leave with a steering wheel...long story. 

I rewarded myself with a day off yesterday - so Jeff and I occupied ourselves in the basement for most of the afternoon - we got the background hills behind the mill stream finished and replanted. I also got a first coat of riverbed material in place - the whole scene needs a few minor details tweaked here and there but it was great fun to spend time working on the layout - having Jeff around only made it more fun!

Down By the Old Mill Stream - 3

New stretch of backdrop. The darker row of "trees" along the bottom of the hill are blocked in shadows that still need some additional detail added.  

This trip down to the old mill stream is taking a LOT longer than I originally planned. You'd think that with the Federal government offices (and most of support contractors) in the DC area closed due to the blizzard I would be able to take advantage of an unplanned 4 day weekend and get all kinds of model railroading done. 
You'd think. 
Instead I've actually been working - all weekend - crunching on a major proposal project. So most of these past four days have been spent on the phone and email revising, reviewing, and revising every word in this thing several times over. 
But I did manage to take advantage of those "breaks" in the action - when I was awaiting input from other team members - to break away and head for the layout room. 

The hillsides to the right (the slightly darker ones) have been repainted to add some more tree detail. The section to the left of this photo (also shown above) is new. 

I managed to get some backdrop painting completed - some of it I "completed" twice as I repainted about three feet of backdrop behind the mill stream scene. I also completed about four feet of newly painted backdrop to the left of the mill scene. 
I've gone back and forth on everything with these painted backdrops from the colors to the approach I use to paint them. I'm actually fairly pleased with this latest section - the photograph at the top of this post shows the scene from "typical" viewing distance in the aisle. With three-dimensional scenery in front of it I think it will work fine. 
I even managed to find 30 minutes today to "block in" some if the distant hills and clouds behind the area where the White River Jct. yard and station had been. 

Sky blue, followed by "clouds" and horizon haze and "blocking" in distant hillsides. 

Speaking of this section of the layout, I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to call this scene. It won't be entirely prototype based, since I need a small yard to sort cars for the locals, and I'd like to have a larger "destination" industry. Instead of trying to get a prototype scene to fit this space, instead I'm going to design and build the elements I need for the layout, and fit them into the space as best as possible. 

Down By the Old Mill Stream -2

Before an update on the mill stream proper - 
In Other News….
Stic came by Saturday and we got quite a number of "small, but annoying and necessary" projects ticked off the "to-do" list. This included some work on the fascia, fastening the sub roadbed and homasote in place in Bethel and filling in a few sections that needed plywood to support track. 

The stream gets some color

On the mill stream project I got some time in this weekend getting the rock outcroppings added to the stream bank and finishing up the landform shaping tasks. 
A quick coat of flat black paint in the "watercourse" and some tan paint on the plaster patches between the foam sections help with visualizing the scene. 

The rocks are a combination of Cripplebush rocks and traditional plaster castings. The plaster rocks got a first coat of color in the form of Hunterline stains (Blue Gray, Light Brown, and Sepia Brown) in an effort to cover the glare of the plaster. 

This whole thing looks a little like a hot mess at this stage, but have faith, things are going to start falling into place with the next couple of steps.