The South 40

Up until now, progress on The Hills Line has focused on the more industrial Iowa City with its tight clearances and numerous grade crossings. I’m now working in the town of Hills, a stark contrast with its agrarian open spaces and features.

One key feature of any rural area in the Upper Midwest is a crop field, which deserves space on any layout set in this locale. Fortunately there are several significant corn and soybean fields around Hills. The shortening of the Hills runaround track gave me more than enough room to model one in a prototypically-appropriate location.

I started with the backdrop first, pulling the images from Google Streetview photos taken in Hills. The finished panorama was then separated into individual sections for mounting. While this process adds seams, it offers an easier process of glueing and mounting the images since I’m not trying to tack up a three-foot-long segment at once.

For the crops themselves, I’m using Bluford Shops corn stalks. Out of the box, the height of the stalks is appropriate for corn that’s ready for harvest. Since The Hills Line is set in May, I need smaller and shorter plants to represent post-emergent corn. So I’m taking a perfect good, and somewhat expensive, box of commercial corn and trimming each stalk down.

The second change is to spread the individual rows further apart. Again, out of the box the strips are designed to be connected together, even including pins and slots to line everything up. But to my eye the finished result is too dense and compact. I use a small strip of balsa wood to space the rows apart, which gives me more coverage for the same cost.

Once the tedious process of pruning and planting is complete, I can start to blend the strips into the scenery. I’m using Woodland Scenics‘ fine turf in soil, earth, and summer green blends to mix everything together. By my May era the ground between the rows would no longer be freshly turned up from planting, but still visible since the stalks haven’t filled in the gaps. The blend was secured with a spray of diluted matte medium applied liberally to the scene.

The cornfield was then weathered with an India Ink wash to dilute the bright colors of the Bluford stalks. Individual rows received a highlight of acrylic paints in various green tones to bring a little randomness to an otherwise orderly scene.