Update

So, this project has been halted for quite some time. Unfortunately due to a lack of space to do any work on it, we haven't really made any progress.

Have acquired a nice white castle for the board, though, which was a bit of a "wishlist" piece at the beginning. Planning on how we can incorporate it into the terrain we've built into the board ...

Hopefully we will now have some time and space in our new "hobby room" to get some work done! Looking forward to turning it into a nice little coffee table when it's finished!

The next step was to shape out the lake and make a tunnel for the train to pass through. We covered the foam with clay and the put a layer of plaster over the top to smooth the surface a bit.

 

We drilled some holes into the table where the town will be situated, though this will probably change somewhat when we get back to work on it. We've got a bunch of half-timbered buildings and a nice, big station - Neuffen.

Next step, sanding down the plaster! Hopefully more pics in the near future :-)

A sea of foam

Here are the beginnings of our Z scale layout. It was a tad tricky to get the polystyrene to stick to the other darker blue foam beneath (which was used to give the landscape height).

Some places even warranted the ever-popular "squash with a telephone book" technique ...

 

We used a regular craft glue, rather than superglue (disintegrating foam, anyone?), to stick down the foam and it appears to have worked well!

All aboard!

Greetings all, and welcome to our new blog. Steam Ventures is dedicated to the Z scale model railway I am building with Christian.

Our model train is a Marklin German Federal Railroad (DB) class V 60 diesel locomotive (see link) http://www.marklin.com/start/pops/81567.html

This project was commenced in 2009. Here are some pics of the original planning phase for the layout.

 

It was quite tedious to figure out how the tracks would best fit on the table and still have an interesting shape for the route. More photos coming soon!