As the line from Prometheus says, what started as a little plastic train set around a cake has become four sets occupying the better part of my apartment floor, and it keeps growing.

I believe I mentioned this in a previous post.  I am absolutely fascinated with Z scale.  It’s so much fun to look at all the detail that goes into this miniscule scale of such mammoth behemoths!  My modular layout is very nearly complete in its basic form.  All I really have left to do is adhere rare earth magnets around the edges of the foam boards.  The magnets will keep the boards from shifting when the layout is displayed, and it will keep everything together when it is folded up and in transit.

Pay no mind to my messy apartment.

I experimented with different ways of setting the ballast beneath the rails.  I tried spray-on adhesive, but the acid ate away at the foam.  I mixed ballast, Elmer’s glue, and vodka to make a sort of paste, and it sort of worked.  The traditional ballast spreading device was okay, but I think it would have worked better on uniformly level surfaces.  Oh, well.  One thing I did really like was using a dropper to soak the curing ballast with more alcohol to help the glue run more along the outline of the ties and trails.  I never intended this layout to be very detailed.  I can’t have too much to it, or it could make a mess if it were all knocked to the floor or broken.