Click to enlarge..

I have continued work on my scenery. The masking tape has been applied over the cardboard webbing and plaster has been applied over a small portion.

Now that I have knocked off the spray booth project I can continue with my scenery project. I am focusing on a tree-lined river being skirted by a causeway. I am drawing elements from the B&M running along the Connecticut River in Vermont as well as the actual operational location of the B&M crossing of the Johns River near Whitefield, NH.

I have finally completed my spray booth! I am excited to have this done, both so I can use it and so I can move on to scenery on my layout. To keep it from being prepetually almost done I stayed on the project as I found time rather then move forward with other things.

The inside has been painted white to seal it. I have little expecation that it will stay white. I will either repaint it or cover it in poster board as required.

This weekend my wife's sister took our one year old for the day (!!!) freeing me and Deb to head up to Vermont. I wanted to take some research photos and my wife wanted to hit the King Arthur Flour shop.

My trip to Vermont included some stops of interest to model railroaders. At an antique mall called

Queechee Gorge Village

I have finally raised the level of my water base in an attempt to mitigate what I felt was excessive height of my causeway and excessive distance between my bridge and the river. I think it helped. Below are some pics of the scene as well as a casting I made of a Chooch bridge abutment that has been cut down a bit in height.

Edit: The second part of this with the completed spray booth is here.

I have started work on a home made spray booth. I am using a 273 CFM squirrel cage blower:

http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/items/1TDR3

After completing the framework for the shorter of the two causeway sections I have realized I have a bit of a problem that needs be resolved. The attached photos show the causeway next to a bridge abutment I plan to cast in plaster and trim down to size. Clearly the slope of the causeway exceeds the size of the abutment which is not how these things are engineered. I need to either change the slope of the abutment, raise the height of the water, or some combination of both. I need to be careful not to make the slope too steep.

I have just completed installing a base for my water feature. Its 1/4" plywood supported on the edge of the facia and by risers attached to joists at six points. I sealed it with gloss medium which needs sanding again. Learning point- install bases for water feature BEFORE installing facia! This was a real pain the butt.

I have found as I progress on my practice layout that I spend at least as much time and money developing a work shop that facilitates the hobby as I do on the actual hobby itself. Recently I have started to find my work bench completely overwhelmed with Jars. While I do have some shelving, I wanted something that would be easy to access while I work without taking up a lot of space. I hit on the idea of suspending a vertical paint rack from the exposed joists in my work area.