In the photo at the right, you can see in the nearest quadrant, some sand has been dumped into the lake bed, and some bungalow houses and mobile homes are placed around the lake. There is a channel from the mountains which provides water to the lake, and a channel to the edge of the lake which will drain the waters. Eventually there will be a road around the lake.
The back quadrant is temporaily holding a bunch of modeling tools to build the city.
All of these buildings are paper models There are a number of high rise shops and apartments, some tenement houses, a few single family homes, a gas station, a passenger terminal, and a diner on the road leading out of town. The one empty block in the center of town will be painted as a public park later.
I used Woodland Scenics Realistic Water for the lake. It looks OK, but it is acrylic and kept shrinking, and I kept having to buy more to fill the lake. I won't be using that product any more. They have a newer product called "Deep Pour Water Clear" which is two part resin. I think that would be a better product than this.
The model is a 3D print which I found on eBay. The printing plastic they used is extremely hard and tough to sand. Eventually with much elbow grease, I got the smoothness I needed. I painted the tower with Tamiya metallic blue, and the lettering and logo were done with acrylic paint markers.
There are two paper freight depots along the tracks. The roads are painted roadways, and there is simple scenery gravel under the shed. Eventually I will put some tractor trailers and industrial equipment in there.
Next up, we will be adding grass and trees, and soon it will be time to run trains.
Thanks for reading my article. I hope you enjoyed seeing the mountains rise up out of my layout. More train layout photos and articles will be posted in the near future.
Other articles in the scale train series include: