The shape of the land.

Quickly moving along, I've spent the week working on the landscape of this 20" square slice of England.  The layout is heavily inspired by images of the Sand Hutton Light Railway in Yorkshire. Though the line itself traverses gradients as much as 1 in 80, photographs of the line make it feel like the area is billiard table flat. I feel a small flat baseboard would look silly. As silly as a train would look traversing a mountain landscape baseboard of the same size. Delicate changes in the lie of the land are called for.
This was achieved by cutting and shaping some pieces of some pieces of expanded polystyrene foam. The roads were also added using a layer of cork.

Expanded polystyrene changes in elevation

 Next comes one of my favourite stages. The Snowscape stage. I cover pretty much the whole baseboard with lightweight spackle. It is, as the name suggests, light in weight. It doesn't shrink or crack and takes colour well. My Purespring Watercress layout lasted 13 years with the material as the base. So it's long lasting too.

It's been snowing!

As much as I love the snowscape stage, it never lasts long. For as soon as the spackle is dry it gets painted with Woodland Scenics Earth undercoat. Once that is down I feel like the layout is starting to take shape.

We have earth.

What next? Probably some ground cover. For in the natural scheme of things, the ground comes first then the roads and railways are placed into the scenery. So it should be in the model.

Perhaps, I might get distracted by some model buildings. The white rectangle in the corner. That's the floor of the tin tabernacle should I decide to put a fully detailed interior in there.

Who knows?