The Atlantic and Southern Build Thread Continued, Part 3

[ACL1504]

Hey Tom,
I just wanted to wish you and the babe a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  Looking forward to your return to modeling in January.

Cousin Brucie

Cousin Brucie,

The Babe and I thank you and Merry Christmas to you as well. Hope your New Year is much less stressful and more modeling is involved.

Tom

[ACL1504]

Tom those bridges are wonderful.


As usual your great work on display!


Jerry

Jerry,

Thank you, very much appreciated. The bridge project was fun but more work is still to be done on it.

Tom

[ACL1504]

Over this past weekend, I was able to obtain the remaining super trees Kris Cutler made for the A&S RR.

I could say these are all mass produced but in reality they are all "one of a kind",  being made one at a time, over time. I'm very honored to have such Museum Quality trees for use on my humble layout. Just seeing the craftsmanship in these trees is getting me more motivated to start the new year early in working on the layout.

Fall colors -

[ACL1504]

Mixed Fall and Winter Green -

[ACL1504]

Close up of the tree trunks -

[PRR Modeler]

Beautiful trees.

[sdrees]

These trees are great looking Tom!

[Mark Dalrymple]

Nice, Tom!

Are the trunks sage bush?

Cheers, Mark.

[Jim Donovan]

Wow, those are really amazing. Hope you post how they look when you place them on layout.

Jim

[ACL1504]

Beautiful trees.

Curt,

Thanks and of course all the credit goes to Mrs. Cutler.

Tom

[ACL1504]

These trees are great looking Tom!

Steve,

Thanks, Kris did a fantastic job on all of them. I feel like I won the tree lottery!


Tom

[ACL1504]

Nice, Tom!

Are the trunks sage bush?

Cheers, Mark.

Mark,

No, they are all Scenic Express trees. I talked to Kris and this is the best compendium I can give on how she made the trees.

The trees were treated with matte medium to stiffen them a bit. She took individual trees or larger limbs and used a flat popsicle stick to add mastic to the trunk. When satisfied with the look, she set them aside for the mastic to dry. After the mastic dried, she used thread to wrap a few together. Then more mastic was added to thicken the main trunk into a larger tree.  She used broken popsicle sticks to add the definitions to the trunk and spread more mastic on the bottom to make the root base.

The tree trunks were then painted various shades of browns and grays. This was a very slow process and you can imagine how long it took for her to do all these trees.

Tom

[ACL1504]

Wow, those are really amazing. Hope you post how they look when you place them on layout.

Jim

Jim,

Thanks for stopping by. I've already started the forest renewal project. Stay tuned and check back in a few hours.

Tom

[ACL1504]

I mentioned I was going to start working on the layout full time in January 2020. So, Happy New year early. I've already started.

Over the past few days I've been doing an urban renewal in the forest areas on the east side of the layout. I previously added new trees to Eaton's Curve and Barlow's Smoke House areas. This took me to the south end of the Suwannee River Lagoon area.

I started this renewal across the road from the country store.

First a photo of all the tree supplies.



This area has the small pond and a few pines.



More in a few.

[ACL1504]

I moved a few trees and added several more.





This area had 14-16 trees and now it has 28.

More in a few.