Reuse or Model Railroaders are Cheap, Act VIII

Model railroaders can be a particular bunch.

A group that will spend $100 or more on the locomotive that gets run for maybe 40 hours a year, but shies away from spending $5 more a sheet for better grade plywood that is supporting thousands of dollars of stuff and hundreds of hours of effort every second of the day is certainly an odd one.

Version1 had backdrops that were painted, not so successfully, as a sky scene.

When it was torn down, I didn't want to throw away these pieces of Masonite (a whole $10 per 4x8 sheet), even if they had been trimmed a bunch to make them fit.

I saved them and figured that I would eventually figure out something to do with them.

I decided that with some black paint, I could turn them into fascia.

A sunny day this January let me take some of the stuff out and slice it down to 5" wide strips to be used.

Getting setup

Stack ready for some paint.

On a slightly warmer day a few weeks back, I painted these strips flat black; I remember taking a picture of that process, but can't put my fingers on it right now, so this one, pre-painting, will have to do.

Used benchwork from a 30+ year old layout that wasn't ever built to support painting. Masonite doesn't have a bunch of strength to sit on a set of sawhorses so you have to work out other ways to make it happen.