Playing with Trains by Sam Posey

Author:Sam Posey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307431615
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

I was delighted to have finished the school’s layout so quickly, but I had no intention of rushing ours. Finishing it was becoming a moving target, and that was fine with me. For years, I had felt burdened by the work remaining; now, with so little left to do, I wanted to savor it. In any case, more remained than just a few details. Although I had been creating individual scenes specifically tailored to the camera, I still intended for the whole layout to have that “get it all at once” impact that is the hallmark of a good painting. I wanted an overall artistic effect, and it wasn’t there—yet.

I asked Ellen to take a look. She had painted the buildings, signs, and figures, and she had mixed all the colors for the rocks—color that Dave Frary called the best he’d seen. But she wasn’t part of the everyday work, and I hoped this would give her the perspective we needed. She took the same slow walk along the layout that Dave had when he was sizing it up for his photographs. Only instead of looking for vignettes and scenes, Ellen’s aim was for a cohesive whole.

“I think it needs more green,” she said finally. “In the front, here.” She pointed to several areas, and I grabbed a bag of lichen and began spreading some around. I remembered that Dave had sprinkled some green in the foreground of some of his shots, and now Ellen was thinking the same way. The more she looked, the more she wanted to see green all across the front. With the reddish brown rocks beyond and the blue sky at the back, the effect would be of long horizontal bands of color rippling like the stripes of a banner.

Once I caught on, I asked Rolf to order two hundred trees and a dozen bags of ground cover. To make room for this great swath of green, we again called Bill, who by now must have been certain it was only a matter of time before he would be asked to cut through the walls so that we could extend the layout beyond the basement.

As the season wound down, we were almost as far from completion as we had been three months earlier. Rolf and I were delighted. Realizing that we were headed for another “last” season, Rolf decided that instead of installing Flextrak on our remaining stretch of mainline he would hand-lay the rails, and he began cutting wood for the individual ties. Work was expanding to fill the time available, and we had plenty of both.

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