On to Scenery Building

I decided to try out Woodland Scenics' Subterrain system. I don't have the carpentry skills required for L-girder construction, didn't want the mess of carving out pink foam, and wanted something more sophisticated than a plain 4x8 sheet of plywood with green flock grass. Also, I knew that I wanted to carry their products, and by building a layout from the ground up with it, I can help customers with pitfalls to avoid and things that worked well for me.

Since I was also working on getting our internet train store up and running at the same time, I decided to use a kit so that I wouldn't need to spend time on creating a track plan figuring out grades and ordering individual pieces. By using the Grand Valley Lightweight Layout Kit, I was able to get everything that I would need to construct the scenery in one package.

Step 1 of construction is gluing down the risers that the track will rest on. The beauty of using these risers is that your scenery can be below track level or above it. This gives some of the flexibility that you normally get with an L-Girder system, very quickly and easily. In total I spent about an hour laying out the risers, and getting everything glued.

The other nice thing about the Woodland Scenics kit is that I saved over $250 vs. buying the pieces separately. We're selling the kit for $380.97 to members which is less than I've found anywhere else on the Internet.