Ingo, Great job on scratch building the bus station! You sure get the feeling of southwest desert scenery! Scott
That is an Excellent layout! Thanks for sharing, and your bus station is simply FANTASTIC! Please post photos of more scenes from your layout!
The town and the tracks flow very well together. And you’ve incorporated nearly every building ever made in Z-scale wonderfully. This is quite the scene overall. Think of all the money a person can save on trees, by modeling Texas…..
Thank you, Lance, but I also buit some stuctures with my own method. For Marfa, Tx. I had to find the right place for the station building in relation to the downtown area. So, I had to plan it backwards and built the prominent buildings of downtown Marfa first. My plan was to show the situation of Highland Street as close to reality as possible. On a vacation trip to West Texas I shot some pics of these buildings. Google maps helped to measure the propper dimensions. The famous Paisano Hotel hostet several actors, like James Dean and Elisabeth Taylor and me, of course . But first, I had to correct the perspectiv and to wipe out peoples, cars and trees in front of the building. I did it with photoshop. Then I removed all not needed parts of the picture and glued the photo on a piece of cardstock. To create deapth, I cutted out the windows and doors and glued another photo from behind on the cardstock. If I needed more structure, like one the bay windows of the hotel, I added there some additionnal layers.
Ingo, I like your technique for creating the buildings. Your are able to achieve a very good amount of detail. I like the night lighting as well. Scott
Really cool, and indeed the "lit night time effects" are fabulous. However, there are several elements on your layout (apart from the incredible variety of buildings) that I think we all need to pay attention to, and that is the street-work, the sidewalks, the raised curbs, and how the buildings and their foundations tie into the sidewalks. From my perspective, these small, yet crucial elements actually give believability to your layout. David K. Smith touted this fact in one of his many tutorials, that buildings need a foundation - something to tie them to the ground. Far too often on "completed" layouts of various scales, we see buildings just "hovering" on the layout. Now, I do understand that some folks loose attach them for cleaning and moving purposes, such as modules, etc. But for stationary layouts like this, these foundations, sidewalks and well laid out roads are the "got yer attention" element for me. Very inspiring TEXRAIL.....
Thank you, gentlemen, for your kind remarks! Dealing with the subject "West Texas" is much more fun for me while exploring history, landscape, economy and art of living in that area. So I´m trying to to collect any information I can get. By my surch I found 3 pitures of a interesting Motel, the Toltec, which was situated on the Tx 90 in Marfa, Tx. The destictive motel was torn down in 1973. Unfortunately I couldn´t find more pictures. So, I used some artistic freedom to recreate the building and guessing the dimensions by measuring well known elements like doors. The gas station was part of the ensemble which was held in adobe style. The gas station waits for some ajustments to meet more the original building.
WOW, that’s quite the complex building. The stucco is very typical of the era as you well know, and artistic license is expected when dealing with older historic buildings.
Started to paint interiors of my Amtrak cars, and placing people inside. Having travelled on Amtrak before, they use a lot of blue colors on seats and carpet flooring. It’s easy enough to pop up the body from the chassis. I used Vallejo Royal Blue and hand painted my observation car with the seats and flooring. A light orange was used for end walls. Silver for the counters. I used Preiser and Merton pre painted figures because of the large windows where you can see them. For all my other cars I will use cheap Chinese figures because you don’t see them very well because of the smoked windows.
Indeed, the figures look great and certainly add “life”. I recently painted a few PREISER people and I’m telling you its a real challenge. But the pre-paints aren’t cheap either.
