New scenery for Illinook

Over the last few weeks there has been a major scenic change on Illinook. Towards the back of the layout there was a big (in relation to the size of the layout) empty space. For quite a while I was considering what to do with the space. A family holiday provided the inspiration.

We visited the Blue Mountains region of New South Wales (Australia) back in March, and one of the places we visited was the derelict Lithgow Blast Furnace. This provided the inspiration to fill the big empty space.

Before the changes were made the back of the layout looked like the top half of this picture:

Now the space is just as big, but it's no longer empty!

A raised up area with a stone retaining wall has been added, and a derelict industry is now located on the raised up area. A considerable amount of foliage and some trees and ground cover has been added to the raised up area as well to give it that overgrown look. Some old corrugated iron sheeting and old pieces of industrial junk have also been scattered around the site.

While in scenery building mode, I also did a lot of detailing of the scenery, adding bushes and other ground cover to parts of the layout that I hadn't got around to finishing yet. As a result, Illinook now looks a lot more 'finished' than previously.

The whole Illinook photo album can be viewed at the Illinook Finished Scenes Photo Gallery.