Hallelujah Paper: Productive Day

[ Hallelujah Paper posts ]

Rolling stock and deco items moved to the ballasted part of the paper mill yard

The plan for today was to paint the paper mill tracks and continue ballasting the paper mill yard. When I got to the club, I remembered that I still needed to get more brown ballast, so that part of the plan went out of the window. After moving buildings out of the way and covering up what I couldn't move, I painted tracks until I ran out of spray paint. Oh well, at least I have only a few feet of yard tracks left. I'll finish that up tomorrow.

I turned my attention to the old pulp wood yard and the wood chip dumper. Before adding ground cover here, the rotary dumper needs to be positioned, which required cutting into the baseboard. I ended up modifying the cross-member that is barely visible inside the hole below.

After some fiddling the rotary dumper fits into place. This dumper is purely a static show piece. We're not going to make this operational. The gears and mechanics of this thing are so bad that it is a pain in the behind to move even by hand. It looks reasonably nice, though.

A couple hours later the wood yard had its ground cover. I used a mix of fine sand, real dirt, isopropyl alcohol, and glue stippled in place to give the ground some texture. This area will get some more weeds, as well as stacks of pulp wood. Behind the rotary dumper will be conveyor belts to move wood and wood chips to the digester for making pulp.

I took the rotary dumper home and gave its plastic parts some texture, rust, and weathering. This doesn't need much detail as it is about 4 feet away from the aisle, so this became mostly an exercise in "make it dirty".