Scenery...finally!

In my opinion, nothing does more for a layout, in terms of its appearance, than scenery.  Even a little bit of basic ground cover or slapping down some earth colored paints looks better than bare plywood with tracks strewn about.  I feel that once you get enough trackage down and finished the track work in a small section you should start scenery in that section right away.  Not only does this allow you to escape the never ending saga of cork, track, and wiring but it also gives vision.

This vision is important because it keeps you interested and motivated, one can easily get burnt out if they continue wiring forever and ever (unless you are an electrical engineer, of course).  It is nice to be able to break away and work on something new,  this is one of the reasons that I decided to build a modular layout.  Vision is also important for when you have visitors to the layout.  A bare plywood table doesn't do much, especially  for people who are not necessarily into just trains, like most of us are.  Once they see the artistic side of the hobby they are more likely to "get it" and generally are interested in seeing more.  Not because they think that the trains are cool but because they think the artistry in your work is incredible.

So...I finally finished the main switch ladder and lead into my yard so I decided it was time to make the layout come to life.  My girlfriend is especially thankful for this; not only does she love to help with scenery but, it makes my layout look a lot nicer. 

Here is a shot of my yard ladder (the track work is actually complete now, you can see the last turnout in this picture only has the straight route stock rail):

And here are some pictures of the abandoned switch tower that used to govern the yard in its earlier life. This would be before it was sold off to Ohio Central and shut down to four interchange tracks:

More to come soon! Thanks for looking!