Trees, bushes and the Circus:

And then the fun began!

I set the circus tents onto the layout and used tweezers to press the tent poles into the foam to hold them in place.

I'd purchased "100 pines and trees" from "treedad" on eBay when I began to think about making a layout. So I opened some of the packages and began planting trees. I used two sizes of pines and two types of deciduous trees. They were planted by grabbing the trunks with tweezers and pressing them into the foam board.

Medium Green Bushes from Woodland Scenics were placed here and there. They were held in place by putting a dab of Scenic Glue onto the bottom of the bush or onto the ground and pressing down gently to make good contact.

I also have a "confession" to make - there are no Z scale circus animals or clowns currently available, so what I have here are actually N scale items. There are four elephants, four giraffes, three camels, and seven clowns, all from Preiser.

I glued the animals to the layout by painting a little Woodland Scenics Scenic Glue onto the bottom of their feet.

Since the clowns only have two feet, they don't stand up on their own, so I cut some small rectangles of quarter-inch foam board and then cut notches in them to make supports so that they wouldn't fall over while the glue dried. A couple of the clowns stood up by themselves when I put the glue on their feet. I don't know if the supports were necessary or if these guys stood up because they had big feet and the glue helped them stand. I glued one clown to the back of an elephant by the seat of his red pants.

As I was cleaning up a bit I discovered a box from "caytrain" (from eBay) of real wood trees - no leaves, just trunks and branches. I think the purpose of these is to put something like Woodland Scenics bush material on them to make them look more realistic than the little foam trees. I planted three of them in the dry grass area as is to represent dead trees.

Oh yes - One caution: Make sure that you leave enough room to set your rerailer ramp up when you need it. I had to transplant a couple trees to make room for mine. Those little wheels on those little train cars are hard to get positioned properly on that tiny track and the rerailer ramp makes it a LOT easier!

The last picture shows what a mess is involved in creating the layout. It also shows what a wonderful and understanding wife I have!

And a word about taking pictures - Make sure that you have plenty of light. Taking pictures indoors, even with flash, can result in pictures with very little depth of field - only a little of the picture is in sharp focus. I solved the problem (top three pictures) by taking the layout outside on a sunny day to get better pictures.

For the finishing touches to the layout, see the next page.