Now that I have gone over most of the build for my layout up to present day (I will take pics of the newest table with the mountains and rock faces in place and post them soon), I thought I would show some of the details I have been working on like tunnel portals, bridges and structures. Since I didn't take any before pics of the portals or bridges before I painted/weathered them, I found pics online of what they look like out of the box.

This first set are what most of my tunnel portals look like with before and after pics. Most of the portals on my layout are natural stone portals as I like the way they look and figure a lot of the tunnels running through the Alps are pretty old and were made using natural stone.

All of the portals are incorporated into the layout at this point and I have touched some of them up now that I saee what they look like with the surrounding mountains. I like to add smoke stains on the outside and highlights if I think the look too flat from a distance. Eventually I will add moss and greenery growing on some of them.

I tried to take a more minimalist approach to the concrete portals. However, when I applied my mix of black acrylic paint and water to the concrete portal in the middle, it stained it way too dark so I quickly started rubbing off the excess and found that I really liked the heavily weathered look I ended up with. Just another example of a mistake turning into a bonus.

For the natural stone portals I used Woodland Scenic pigments applying them with their leopard spotting technique then giving them a wash of scenic cement and following that with a black wash and another wash of scenic cement. Then I used the dry brushing technique with acrylic paints to add more diversity to the color of the stones as well as highlights. Note that the after pics above show them mostly complete since I do add some of the extra color now that they are in place.

These next photos are before and after pics of some retaining walls also made by Woodland Scenics. These are actually N scale walls but the stone sizes still look good in Z scale.

I used the same technique to paint these as I did with the stone portals.

Next are photos of two of my viaduct bridges. These are also N scale bridges but again they look just fine in Z scale.

Both of these were painted by staring with an acrylic/water wash with a light gray paint then dry brushing with various darker gray colors and some burnt and raw umber for little pops of color. Note that the straight viaduct comes out of the box much much darker than you see in the stock photo. It comes as almost a charcoal gray.

I had mentioned in my original post that I was adding Castle Neuschwanstein in bavaria to my layout as I had visited it when I was in high school. I found a kit in 1:220 (Z scale) and built it last winter. I weathered it using black acrylic and water washes. Since I plan on lighting all my structures I glued frost colored paper on the insides of all windows to diffuse the light and I use black acrylic paint to darken random windows to look more realistic. In real life, no structure has ALL of it's lights on at the same time. I don't have any before photos of this kit so you can just enjoy the fruits of my labor

These next photos are all plastic kits. I still have to weather them but you can see what they look like in completed form. I added a quarter to the pics for scale.

This last photo of the burned house has a hole to add a smoke tube. I plan on adding the tube as well as flickering fire effect to it that will only work for maybe a minute after pushing a button. A fellow railroader once talked about not having "perpetual" effects on his layout such as "forever burning buildings" and the like but my wife's nieces will get a kick out of playing with it and I think making it a temporary effect helps. Plus, you often see houses that had been burned sitting around in that state for long periods until they are either torn down or rebuilt.

These last photos are cardstock kits. Again, they are still waiting for weathering.

I plan on automating the doors to the roundhouse so I can open and close them remotely most likely using micro servos. The lumber mill's water wheel is motorized. The "lumber" pieces that came with the kit were plastic and didn't look that great esp next to this beautiful model so I made my own lumber out of scrap wood.

That's it for now. More posts to come soon showing more of the layout with portals installed, trackwork, wiring and all kinds of fun stuff. I also have some challenges I will need help with so I'm hoping this amazing group of fellow model railroaders will have some ideas.

Anthony