Monday 18 April 2022

Yellow Pelican Mining Co. - Easter 2022 update

Both Sue and I had loads of plans for this Easter break but earlier this week we both tested positive for Covid and found all of our plans put on hold.....

However as the weather was so good, we spent most of our time in the garden, both gardening and just enjoying the sun - luckily Covid was not as bad as others have reported, although both of us are still weak and looking forward to two negative tests so we can once again go out into the world.

With all of this free time on my hands, and not being one to just sit around doing nothing, I brought the narrow gauge railway layout out of the garage and decided to spend some time modelling the groundwork and rocks. For anyone not familiar with this project - The Yellow Pelican Mining Co. is a long term project for my grandson's (that's what I'm telling Sue anyway) - an industrial mining railroad running on scale 18 inch gauge track and built to unusual scale of 11 mm = 1 foot or 1/27.7

The first three images, show the initial basing of the two main buildings and the start of the rocks. I have used both my hot glue gun and PVA glue to glue the buildings in place and DAS modelling clay (Stone and White varieties) to 'bed' everything in.

The next three images shows further work and even more DAS - in each set of images I have given three views of the compact layout - front on, from the left and from the right.

I have so far used two packs of DAS, dozens of sticks of hot glue and about a pint of PVA glue. The coarse ground cover (seen in some images) is a mix of cat litter, sieved stones and sand applied over PVA glue. The rock outcrops are modelled from a couple of pieces of insulation foam as I need to keep the weight down - it already requires two people to move it from the garden to the garage even thought I have done everything I could to keep the weight down.

Work has come to stop as I'll need to get more DAS prior to starting the painting. Hopefully I'll get some paint on to the model this Summer.


The layout is a simple 'tail chaser' with two spurs, the first to the front and a second around the back to store a second loco. My earlier OSO SALT layout was a simple shelf layout - basically just a motorised diorama, but it was obvious that both Finley and Charlie weren't interested as they just want to see engines running round and round rather than shunting back and forth.

I'll post updates when they become available.

Tony

3 comments:

Codsticker said...

That is coming along very nicely.

(Kym) + Warburton + (Classic40K) said...

This looks great - nice work.

Best wishes for your covid recovery.

Tony said...

Thank you.