Waiting on the mail!!!!!!!!!

Progress continues, at a slow pace. I'm hung up on completing the Crawford grain I've been working on as I didn't have the parts needed to finish. I'm now waiting on UPS and the Postman to deliver what I need to move forward. I sure hate not having a local, well stocked hobby shop. The closest one to me is a four hour drive and the next one worth going to is a five hour drive. So, for those of you that have one close by, support it!!! Otherwise, you'll be in a mail order hobby like I am.

In the mean time, I started working on the scenery base around my HWY 45 underpass at Crawford. The foam is in and the wood base for the road is glued in and drying. The next step is to get more foam on the back side of the tracks and carved out. Then I have to decide what I'm going to cover the foam with. The two things I'm looking at are plaster cloth from Woodland Scenics or Scenic Express or going with Joe Fugate's ground goop made from fine vermiculite, portland cement and patching plaster. Both form a hard shell scenery. I'm actually thinking of using BOTH. First, a light layer of the cloth to cover the foam and tie everything together then the goop to fine tune the land. Plus, I figure this will add extra strength to my scenery base. I've got three kids from age 4 to 9 and need extra strength on everything in the house.
I've also started working on my TXI cement plant at Artesia. As you can see, the base model of this plant is the Walthers Valley Cement kit. I'm going to add onto this kit and bash it some to better represent the TXI plant I'm modeling. I'm about as far as I can go on this project too as I'm waiting on needed parts to continue.
On the bright side, we'll be making a family trip to Atlanta soon and I have Kennesaw Trains on the top of my list. I plan on leaving there with a good bit of scratch building materials to further these two and other projects.