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My family’s Christmas, er, New Year’s layout, Shogatsu, has been retired for the year. We haul it out of the basement for only a couple months each year, around New Year’s, to work on it and display it. This year’s time is up. We made some small progress on it, especially in forestation and village construction. New concrete retaining walls were built, and our village received a bath-house, a liquor store, a long string of merchant stalls for the New Year’s festival, and a portable shrine being hauled down the main street. It also received a new bit of rolling stock, a Tomytec モ1030.
Before we packed it up last weekend, I made a video of it, below.
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Without any kind of warning device, the local commuter train is likely to strike village traffic!
Shōgatsu has a road, or part of one. The as-of-yet unnamed village (suggestions, anyone?) needs a road connection to the outside world—trains run on only a very irregular schedule and often bypass the station.
Building the road [...]
Plastic screen retaining wall and abutment.
Not literally, of course. In addition to planting hundreds of trees (and yet, the mountains are still rather bare!) I’ve been constructing retaining walls and abutments. The process is really simple. I find an area of the layout that needs a retaining wall; I’ve left these areas [...]
The New Year’s Festival has Already Begun
Up from the inky depths of the basement comes Shōgatsu, my family’s Christmas New Year’s layout! In the intervening months, we’ve collected a couple of TomyTec buildings. I’ve also managed to assemble and decal the various little festival stalls we bought last year. Finally, we’ve added [...]
 Shōgatsu, 21 February 2009 Well, Shogatsu is a seasonal layout. The season it was built for—New Year’s—is long over. It is time to retire the layout to the basement until next November. Then I’ll pull it out and being work anew. That gives me six months or so to experiment with various scenery techniques to apply when I pull it back out of storage. Read on for more photos.
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The mountains, complete
I’m back, more or less! I hope all had a great winter holiday.
As you can see, plastering is now 100% complete. A few final comments on the plastering process: Some things I have learned. Bare plaster soaks up acrylic paint, and mixes with it. Painting plaster mountains requires that, [...]
Again, progress. What can I say? Sorry I didn’t get this up yesterday: We accomplished all this in a Sunday afternoon. Next weekend we hope to finish with the plaster cloth, and to begin detailing in earnest.
I also got in a Tomix Cleaning Car this weekend. The short version is that [...]
I’ve only put a little foliage down on part of the layout, but there’s just enough to begin experimenting with model train photography. Here we see EF66-28 emerge from a tunnel on the…well, I guess I have to make up a name for this line, don’t [...]
Perhaps I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here, but this is about where things stand. We’ve got mountains (sort of), and tunnel portals (mostly), and foliage (but just around this one tunnel portal). Things are looking good! The portal is a Greenmax, model no. 14-2, lightly weathered with India ink. The foliage [...]
…but Came Down a Mountain. Nope, too long to have the right wittiness about it. I’ll keep on tryin’ though.
I couldn’t find any more RFTs, so I reverted to that old standby, Student Life (warning: PDF linkage). At a total of two sheets per issue, it took larcenous numbers to complete the job, [...]
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