Working with the paving sand I picked up today.  I sifted some and separated out the fine material, used some thinned white glue brushed over the inside of the cut and sprinkled it on, letting it stick naturally and run down into the ditches.

This is how it turned out without any fiddling or brushing.

  Even though I have considered my self a model railroader for a long time, there is a ton of stuff I have never tried.  I rely a lot on books and articles to give me tips and techniques and then tweak or discard as applicable.  Since I have Dave Frary's scenery book and he mentioned that Sculptamold was one of his favorite things for making ground contours, I thought would give it a try.  

  I know I am pretty slow at getting my modules built, but I have a lot of distractions.  This week I managed to get my Inglenook wired up with an Anderson connector so I can just leave the FreeMoN cable hooked up to the Zephyr and plug it in.  My sweetie also bought me an early Christmas present, this nifty little hobby cart.

So we spent a couple of hours putting it together and loading the drawers with tools and stuff.

  I spent about a half hour in the garage before work today hacking at the foam to get it ready to lay track.  My two extensions to the ColdStor module are intended to further represent the whole "Woodland fill" area.  I am finding that having rectangular endplates with the track and roadbed sitting right at the top edge is forcing me to put in features to raise the ground level as it approaches the ends of the module.

   Being such a NOOB in most aspect of model railroading, even though I am (soon to be) 53 years old and have considered it to be my hobby for most of my life, it seems that I have actually done very little modeling!  I have built a few buildings, though only two actually got painted.  NEVER weathered a piece of rolling stock.  NEVER laid ballast.  Built a piece of hardshell scenery to try it out, but it never got groundcover or even paint!  I have built a few trees, but most of that happened when I was still young and working in HO scale.

  Last weekend we had our second local FreeMoN get together.  It was a lot of fun!  We were hosted at the Columbia Gorge Model Railroad Club, and set up in their clubhouse.  They were there getting ready for their open house season (Christmas time), so a lot of the club members were there.  A motorcycle group was also getting a private tour of the HO layout, resulting in quite the audience!  Five of us brought modules, but Adam's was not fully operational and did not get set up.

  I have had time to get some more done on the cold storage facility, but the more I looked at it, the more I decided I wanted to add another door.  Now it has gone from 30" to 38" long, and it means that I nee to re-do the long section of the photo pasteup.  I will be able to use the old one as a source of relief details.

   I made it back from the convention in one piece.  Next time I won't dither so long in deciding whether to go or not.  I missed out on the Mt. Rainier railroad excursion, that would have been super cool.  But it was still an amazing time!

  Tomorrow I zip up I-5 to the National Narrow Gauge Convention.  This will be my first ever event of this type and I don't know quite what to expect.  I am not a narrow gauger, but I have heard that there will be some spectacular modeling on display, and some wonderful layouts to tour, and clinics, lots of clinics...full report when I get back.

  While we have some nice days left this summer, I wanted to get some more done on the FreeMoN module.  Plus the next meet is fast approaching in October, and it will be here before we know it.  I took advantage of it tonight after work and dragged the modules out onto the sawhorses in the back yard.  I looked at a couple of track weathering articles (MRH article) and carted the airhose, airbrush and equipment out there too.  I had been planning on this for awhile, and picked up some Pollyscale rust at th