Impressions of Disneyland

Very nice !!  Thanks for posting.

Cool! 

I enjoyed reading your stories about creating all the DL pieces when you wrote them up on another site years ago, I'm sure this thread will be a lot of fun to follow as well.

-Dave

I was going to ask you for this very thread once you seemed more settled here. Thanks for beating me to it .

Looks great! Thanks for sharing. 

 Wow Becky  - that is some really nice work.

Keep us posted... thanks for sharing... Any plans for a permanent layout?

Awesome work. Can't wait to hear and see more.

I especially like the tree house.  Reminds me of when I worked a Disneyland.

J Daddy posted:

 Wow Becky  - that is some really nice work.

Keep us posted... thanks for sharing... Any plans for a permanent layout?

 

That's what I'm using to store this stuff off season. 

Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse.

Well here's the heart of the "Semper Florens Disneyodendron Eximus". (Or something like that!) Ever blooming grand Disney tree if I got that close to correct:

Just a big piece of scrap styrofoam packing material and:

Some generic plastic greens from a craft store. And then, you guessed it, more expanding polyeurethane spray foam insulation. (Love the stuff!)

Carve it, paint it, stain it, you've got yourself a tree!

At the time I built this, I didn't have a lot of good photos of either park trees or the movie set, so I just did a freeform build and didn't worry a whole lot. (That's the closet mantra of this whole project.) So, treehouse construction was very simple. I embedded a few 1/4" (6mm) square balsa pieces into the main trunk to act as support for the main deck. Onto this I used strip wood roughly 6mm wide to crate the deck, and pieces of posterboard and matchstick pine (headless) to frame up the walls and roof supports:

By the way, this tree is lighted using a string of 120v grain of wheat bulbs that I get at my craft store. So you may see the big green wire from time to time running through the branches.

Here's the part that I still think is bizarre that I even thought of it!  The roof is posterboard and:

Rope!  Weird huh?  Also good old fashioned super-messy fun!  I use good old hemp, jute, whatever you want to call it natural fiber rope. I cut off a piece a bit longer than what I need, unravel it into it's constituent strands, and then unravel them one at a time as needed. I spread some Aleene's Tacky Glue on the posterboard, lay some strands on top of it, and then with a stiff, plastic bristle brush I overcoat the fibers so that I end up with a soggy glue saturated mess! Usually my fingers too as they're often the best tool for this work!  When dry, you just trim away the excess and you've got a reasonable facsimile of a thatched roof. Messy but cheap!

Up top there are two small structures

Paper lanterns hang from the branches. These are from the Disney Experience Wicked Wench kit (Pirates of the Caribbean, Jack Sparrow's vessel) although the light washes out the details.

The bridge is again, a freeform design based on books I have about the parks.

This side is incomplete. I still need to figure out a good way to represent the water lift system, and it's associated piping.

So where does the treehouse live:

Front and center, between the Disneyland marquee and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye. See that little kiosk on the left? It has the same kind of rope roof. As does:

...which is in fact the Canon five storied pagoda of Horyuji Temple, Japan in disguise!  Canon has downloadable paper model kits of many kinds, including famous and historic buildings from around the world.  Google Canon Creative Park to see what this kit normally looks like when it's not "for the birds". 

Pirates of the Caribbean.

Start with the Torre del Cielo model designed by Ray Keim Torre del Cielo Paper Model Kit add a few lights:

The light on the side is the lamp housing from an MTH O scale street lamp. The clock faces, like most windows etc. that I want to light up, were printed on velum. I find velum gives you a nice, even, soft glow across the entire surface and while it often requires a lot of wasted toner to print the extra pages from kits like this I feel the results are worth it.

The walls of this were freeform. I accumulated pieces from many different sources: scrapbook papers, trim from the Torre kit, and a tile roof pattern I made up years ago (scheduled for replacement since I now have better textures.)

The sign came from searching the net until I found a good quality straight ahead photo that I could use coupled with the crow's nest and jolly roger of the wench and a few dowels:

The palm trees are a kit I made up years ago and the ferns are aquarium greens!  This may be the strangest building in the park to date. Here's a look at it from the back side:

It's the only building so far that was made specifically to hide the Christmas tree stand.  On the other side of the tree I plan to have Captain Hook's ship anchored in Skull Rock Cove as soon as possible after that model (under development at the Disney Experience) gets released.  Otherwise I'll continue having workmen there behind a wall! 

The Liberty Tree:

I made it using my treehouse leftovers.

This shows the detail of the paper lanterns better. Lots of flowers, a bit of Sleeping Beauty Castle brickwork and a few benches and viola! You've got a tiny park scene.  This is supposed to live in Liberty Square in front of the Hall of Presidents which is represented currently by the Plasticville Independence Hall.  But not always.  One year it was outside the Country Bear Jamboree! 

Sleeping Beauty Castle

Let's get to the heart of the park. I don't really have any build photos of the castle itself, just pics from doing the landscaping. The only real changes I made to the Disney Experience kit were to add black paper and/or black cardstock to interior spaces to block light penetration. These pics will at least give you some ideas how and where I lighted it:

The floodlights in front were made using plastic caps from I don't even remember what and the bases were little plastic Y shaped pieces that used to come on bottles of Flonaise!  How's that for a scrounge? 

The upper level flood lights are hidden in little light boxes I embedded in the rear of the towers that flank the entrance. It's subtle, but you can see the 2 window sections here also light up and, there's also a slight gap at the base of the main tower to create "up-lighting".

Around back you can see the lights inside the castle that are otherwise invisible when the layout is set-up. There's only about 4 inches between this area and the lagoon at the base of the Matterhorn. It's also facing walls!

This photo is my favorite. The lighting just all worked out great and I only wish I had the slightest clue how it happened!

Looking toward the drawbridge you can see how well the polyeurethane "water" reflects the model.

Believe it or not, the castle is already scheduled for demo and reconstruction. It's taken some damage since these photos were taken in 2011 and it's already fading a bit. I had hoped to get to it this summer but I doubt I'll have enough time with all the new stuff I'm trying to add. But at the very least I want to replace the trees with a new type I started making last year.

Tree making

First, a word of caution. This technique uses 380 degree Fahrenheit glue and is not for everybody.

I use 26 gauge uncoated floral wire to make the skeleton:

Sometimes I use this styrene jig but most of the time I just coil out the wire in a continuous loop. Eight loops per branch has been a good number for me. Make each 8 loop cluster different lengths and have them come from different levels of the main trunk:

Twist, twist, twist!

Start applying the glue. You have to work slow and give the glue enough time to cool. So don't work one branch at a time. Work the bottoms of all branches on the highest level, and then go back to the first one and start working the tops. Work the tree from the top down and fold the lower branches down out of your way. Don't fold them back up until you've coated the trunk between levels.

I like to use plastic caps of various sizes as a temporary base for these trees. I drill a small hole in the center and let about 5mm of the steel poke through so I can mount them later. Also, use the glue to create a root structure for your tree.  The tree will be easy to remove if the temporary base is plastic (or metal).

Glom on your base coat. And I mean glom! Let it go on thick and let it dry completely before you move on. I like to use a light brown, either a beige or sable.

The next step is a light gray wash. I do a 1:1 acrylic/water wash and let it flow from the top down. Notice that you can still see some of the wire here. Since this tree will receive flocking the exposed metal won't show.

After the gray dries, it's time for the shadow wash. This is a 1:4 black/water wash. I let it flow into all the nooks and crannies and really bring out all the character of the "bark".

The last step is the foliage. I like Woodland Scenics clump foliage bricks. I pull off 2 clumps at a time and stretch them out a bit. One large and high for the top and one thinner for the bottom. Then I put a bit of hot glue on the tips of the branch I want to foliate and make a sandwich of it between the two clumps of foam rubber. It's best to start with the lower branches and work around and up. That's it. When you're ready to plant, you pry up the tree roots and all from your temporary base and you're good to go. I use hot glue to install the trees too.

This works well for just about any type of tree. I've done simple greens like the one I made here, flowering trees, even a reasonable rendition of a weeping willow. Just experiment and have fun. But watch your glue gun! You can get burned very fast!  I can't speak for durability as I've only been making these for a short time.  But I can tell you that the tree stays flexible because of the hot glue coating.

More to come!

Becky

Splash Mountain

This is where that tree ended up:

The denuded tree on the upper level and the stump up top were made using the same method. As were:

The bark on the ride vehicles. Mountain construction should be no surprise as it was very similar to my previously described technique. The only difference, and I hope it doesn't turn out to be a mistake in the long run, was that I used minimally expanding latex foam for this module rather than the max expanding polyeurethane foam I'm accustomed to. It took forever to set at all and it's way too easy to damage. I'm just going to have to hope it holds up.

I know this photo is a bit dark...but can you find Splash Mountain in it?

How about now? It lives in the left rear corner of the display which is near our front door. Because of that, there's an end table directly above the mountain to protect it and the rest of the layout. The white picket fence is also a great way to protect the layout as it acts as a "first defense" against those wayward toes!

Kilowatt palms

Here's one of those "little things" that I love to make:

There are 4 of these adding light to Tomorrowland. I made them using N Gauge 6v DC highway lights. This is a bit of a pain actually because my standard lighting grid for the layout is 14v AC. So I have a small power pack hidden inside Space Mountain just for these lights.

The same type of lamps are used in Fantasyland at the Mad Tea Party:

You can see that they originally had a light lower down that I removed from the palms since they would have ended up inside the trunks. The Tea Party features cups made from ping pong balls. The bases are little inserts from the caps of childproof pill bottles and the handles are just bits of wire. None of that stuff was easy to paint by the way! The people are early hot glue people or as I like to call them "glueples".    They were made by squirting the hot glue out onto a sheet of tempered glass in somewhat human upper torso, lower torso, etc. segments then scraping them off the glass with a #11 blade.  Glue the body segments together, paint and you're good to go.  My more modern version involves a wire armature to make the figures posable.

Yesterland

As one of my favorite websites is named. These are a few of the things that came and went for one reason or another.  Basically when I started this project I built everything oversized to fill as much space as possible. Why? Because that way I could carve out more real estate early and downsize attractions in the following years as I came up with better designs. Making the park big and impressive on day one quelled the arguments about how much of the living room it takes up! Sneaky little devil aint I? 

The Wicked Wench.

This one was really great. But also really really big and way too tall.

It represented the Jolly Roger which was a restaurant run by Chicken of the Sea that lived in Fantasyland from 1955 to 1982.

It was also supposed to be Captain Hook's ship. So naturally I had a Tick-Tock-Croc!

Over time it first lost it's beach and tent, then it lost it's height. In 2015 it lost it's place to make way for the new Storybookland. The model still exists, I don't think I'll ever destroy it unless I feel like building a new one. But this size model was always scraping it's masts on the lowest branches of the tree. So when the Disney Experience announced that there would soon be a model of the actual restaurant, I had no problem setting this one out in favor of the new model. Still holding the space open...

This is why the WW lost it's beachfront:

I decided to have a parade!

The parade ran from Dumbo to Frontierland in an endless loop using a Tomy James engine as motive power for the 2013 season only. While it performed reliably in testing, I just couldn't keep the floats from colliding with things near the track in practice. So it was easy to decide to have more structures rather than keep the rather large amount of space required to keep the parade, so it was retired.

The third major attraction I attempted from scratch was...

The Monorail

Using a 3d template as a guide, I cut the front and rear end sections from aluminum soda cans.

I had difficulty with the noses so I ended up making those with Sculpey oven bake clay. The car bodies were from Marx M10,000 clockwork trains. It ran on a 1990's 4 wheel Lionel motor on a system of O31 track with the center ties removed elevated on pylons of my own design.

The pylons had Lionel track clips at their tops and one had wiring hidden in a piece of square styrene tubing that attached to clips I jammed into the rails.  It was a lot more "El" than it was monorail!

Like the parade it ran in 2013 only. It's principal downfall was the track. The addition of brass side skirts to the cars coupled with the cars only having a single axle was just too much for the little train. Constant derails coupled with the high initial cost of replacing the track with a wider radius curvature sealed it's fate. At an average of 30 dollars per car, of which there were 5, plus the cost of the motor which was around $50 I just couldn't add another $100 to 150$ for new track for a train that still only "might" work better. It was cheaper to buy the battery operated set from the Disney Store which is what I did in 2015.

Liberty Square Haunted Mansion

It started it's career with the attached cemetery.

Again it was just too large to stay. Also, it was always in the center rear of the layout in a place that's very hard to see. So it too gave way and now a new Haunted Mansion will rise in a new New Orleans Square.

Tom Sawyer Island

Starting with the Disney Experience Mark Twain kit and the Seite 42 Micky Maus Magazin Old West Fort kits as my guide, TSI and the Rivers of America were carved out using my favorite mountain building techniques. With the exception that I had some hydrocal castings sitting around not doing anything which I decided to include.  Micky Maus Magazin was a German publication that featured games, toys and simple cut out models for kids on or about page 42 of each issue.

Originally it was the "under the table" item where Splash Mountain lives today. Note the "new" Frontierland Station that replaced the one shown in my first post. Even the one in this pic has been replaced by a rebuild due to damage incurred in a train wreck!

And when you scroll up to the first photo you can clearly see the railings of the Mark Twain warping outward. For 2014 I rebuilt it with added reinforcing columns and thickened the decks to prevent the sagging. I also printed several copies of each railing page so I could have both an inner and outer texture which the original kit lacks. If you want to do that, you have to reverse the parts.  Since I couldn't print a mirror image, I just swapped the pieces port and starboard to create the inside. I also glued the railing sections to posterboard before cutting so they're a lot thinker than they're meant to be. That means you'll need to trim the decks accordingly. The ship also got lighting this time around!

Along with the new Twain I built this little dock structure. Originally the river came right up to the edge of the board across the front and somehow as if by magic the water never flooded Frontierland! This is just matchstick construction with a cardstock roof but the lattice in the railings is plastic canvas. This is sold in knitting stores or departments of craft stores and is meant for yarn work. But I think it makes dandy lattice!  The real trick was trying to match the paint with the cardstock I used for the roof.

And Fort Wilderness too got upgraded. The new fort is made mostly of wood and bamboo. Gone too are the "blue" spruces thanks to a coat of fine turf.

Bear/Critter Country

Small land!

CBJ joined the fun in 2012. It lived first along side the Jungle Cruise.

Then it lived between Big Thunder Mountain and the Haunted Mansion with the displaced Liberty Tree (don't remember why the tree got booted from Liberty Square). And now it backs up to Tom Sawyer Island in front of Splash Mountain. These bears really get around!

Awesome creativity! Keep going!

I will but I have to get some sleep so I can buy trains tomorrow! 

OK, got some postwar Lionel goodies yesterday at the TCA show so it's back to work!

New Orleans Square

Just 2 little building initially: The Silver Banjo Barbecue and the other Haunted Mansion. Well...sort of. Half of a haunted mansion really...or is it a half-haunted mansion?    Well it wasn't either one as it was Aunt Jemima's Pancake House!

Anyways. It's gone now and there's a new New Orleans Square:

There's only one Haunted Mansion now and it's the full building this time.

If you never heard of it, there's a super swanky restaurant in NOS that's very expensive and very exclusive called Club 33. Since it costs plenty to join the club and there's a waiting list years long, even the entrance to it is a bit tricky to find in the real park. So I hid mine too. Just an oval plaque on the wall tells you there's something here.

The railings, windows and doors of the new Silver Banjo Barbecue on the left came from the New Orleans Square Haunted Mansion kit (On the right in photo 2) . While the railings, windows and doors of the Cafe Orleans on the right came from Ray Keim's Norman Bates House kit. The roof of the Cafe Orleans came from Ray's Phantom Manor (Eurodisneyland Haunted Mansion) kit. (Haunted Dimensions is the name of the site if you're interested in building any of these.)  On the opposite side from the Cafe Orleans, the building has doors and windows from Abraham Lincoln's house from Build Your Own Main Street/Build Your Own Lincoln Sites and railings of my own design.  The net is loaded with free to download card model kits which can be modified and/or kitbashed.  This little section of my Disneyland represents parts from about a dozen different sources.

There's really no scale to my Disneyland. That's why I say "Impressions of Disneyland" rather than "Model of Disneyland". These MTH people are as a lot of you are aware drastically undersized for O Scale and look like children compared with most traditional sized figures. But they're right at home at these homemade tables.

Autopia

My first attempt at the Autopia. The bumper rails in the roadway are strips of styrene. The lamp posts are bits of bent styrene tubing and the lamp shades are thin brass.

No spray foam here just a kraft paper hill stuffed with newspaper. I doodled up the little building with Metasequoia (a 3d modeling program) based very roughly on a structure that was added to Tomorrowland in 1998. The cars were cheap pull-back races I found at K-Mart. I cut their roofs off, ground off a few details and primed and painted them. Then I added safety bars, bumpers and glueples.

The Autopia will live next to Space Mountain where the large "Rocket to the Moon" also known as the "TWA Moonliner" has been for a couple of years on the center right of this photo.  The Moonliner...

...has been rebuilt.  This version is 1/2 the size of the previous version, or just a hair longer than a standard #11 X-Acto blade and holder.  It will move closer to the front of the park and I'm still working on the design of the building (restaurant) it will live next to.

Big Thunder Mountain

The wildest ride in the wilderness. The "ghost town" is filled with buildings from Whitewash City.

You wouldn't know it by the time I got done, but this LifeLike tunnel is the foundation of Big Thunder Mountain.

It was combined with the ghost town and wood dowels were added to give the spray foam something to stick to.  The DLRR was by the way originally a DC operation and used the James Gang version of the General for motive power.  It was upgraded in 2014 to an AC powered Lone Ranger General.

The void was filled with newspaper and papered over with brown kraft paper.  The foam was already carved when I took this pic.

Here's the view from the rear. Note that the base coat was applied to the foam on top. This was done to make it easier to see details in the foam. Now here's where it gets amusing!

Packing peanuts of many types make Big Thunder the mountain it is today. I hot glued them in many places and used them to fill larger voids where newspaper would have been too weak.  One type of peanut that's biodegradable I found to be particularly useful.

I found that by wetting them a bit, they became malleable and I was able to mold them to fill gaps between the different materials.  Then I just did kraft paper paper mache over top and you'd never know they were even there.

I used a lot of colors and a lot of washes trying to simulate southwestern US rock formations.

When doing washes I always work from the top down. So this large central peak was where I found out whether or not I could do what I was trying to do.  All the natural nooks and crannies that appear when the spray foam is carved made the painting a lot easier.

The first rails were large brass wires. A few stones and large grain granite sand were added to give the mountain a more finished look.

Dinosaur skeletons were embedded in the sand.

And lighting was added.

The first round of improvements added a loading platform, simple mine head and riders in the cars (some of the first glueples).

First loading station.

The second round of improvements was much more dramatic.  Adding the piece across the front 2 years earlier made for very weak construction. So I made a new stronger base and got rid of the "tracks to nowhere" look that had been there since day 1.

The landscaping was upgraded all the way around and the track now has much more of a thrill ride look to it.  (I'd still like to improve the ghost town buildings though.)

The first loading platform building was too large, it always obscured too much of the mountain. So I made the new version slightly smaller, opened up the doors and added lighting. The new mine head is wood and looks much better.

Adding the small details is always the fun part!

It's a lot of fun building trestle bents when you don't care how strong or symmetrical they are!

And all of this was built to display a couple of paper models!

Becky,

You've done a fantastic job!!!  I grew up in Southern California and spent many days at Disneyland. I especially like that you have everything in its proper place!

Keep up the good work!

Main Street Station

This is the same station that I had been using since 2009 with Standard Gauge and G Scale trains before I decided to build Disneyland.

Naked bulbs with very visible wiring taped in place and all of it making very visible light bleeds through the platform roof .

I had to have the Life Like lamps close to the station originally since there were no lights inside the building.

Out with the old. In with the new!

Here's my 2016 rebuild:

The new station has walls made or corrugated cardboard and is very substantial. I thought about testing them with an MTH 0-8-0 but I chickened out! The new vellum windows and clocks really light well. There are 3 peel and stick lights inside the building. Two n gauge streetlamps flank the center entrance. These lights are white plastic globes on brass poles.  I removed the pole bases, gently bent the brass tubing 90 degrees, inserted the tubing through holes I made in the walls with a punch, reattached the bases backwards and hot glued them to the inside of the wall. This gave me nice little wall lamps just about equal in size to the ones represented in the graphics.

I added a ceiling down the platform to hide the wires that were exposed and tended to droop on the previous model. I also cut faceted plastic beads in half, bored out the center and made these neat little light covers for the 6 grain of wheat bulbs that light the platforms.

Floral Mickey

If you go back to the first photo in this section you can see that the garden was made of cardboard and foamcore with a long 1/2" square piece of bass running along the back.  I finished by gluing on posterboard to make this large wedge shaped garden.

I printed out a picture of Mickey and doodled up the scrolls by hand.  I glued those templates to posterboard and then added them to the base.  The garden presented a unique problem. How to create elaborate floral displays without using individual plants?

I decided to use large ballast. By gluing it on for only one color at a time, and then painting each section the final color as I went along, I was able to achieve the look I was after without completely obscuring my template.

A bit of turf, a few trees and I was done.  The rebuild this year changed the trees to more realistic ones and I transferred the Life Like lamps from the station platform to the garden to make the lights inside the station stand out better.

Fun project, nicely executed. I prefer the old school Disneyland look...

 ...far more than the steampunk look that has been adapted in some areas.

I don't believe Walt would be a fan of it either. There's nothing futuristic about this Tomorrowland.

Where is Club 33?

Somewhere in here I think...

Wow, wow, and WOW!  Amazing stuff!

Bravo!

I have never, ever been even near a Disneyland !!

Very impressive. Having been to Disney many times, you have definitely captured the flavor of the parks. 

Wow! Great work, a lot of great techniques that I will try.
Love Disney Land in CA. I also like the club 33 video.

Thank you and keep us posted on any new project or technique.

Mill City...far more than the steampunk look that has been adapted in some areas.

I think it had to do with the fact that Eurodisneyland was and still is not as popular as they thought it would be.  They decided to drastically redesign "Discoveryland" and give it that look to try and tie it back to Jules Verne, thereby making it more respectable(?) to the French.  Who knows.  But the company Walt Disney started only directly owns Disneyland (CA) and Walt Disney World (FLA).  In order of construction, Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong and Shanghai are all franchises owned primarily by international investors.  Personally, I don't like what the French did to Space Mountain.    But Tomorrowland has always been a problem.

Very awesome I love your work here, you have captured the spirit of Disney. I really like your rendition of the common tree with hot glue, I never thought of that and will be giving that a go. No reason it won't last a long time as it's basically melted plastic. Great transformation of many household items into very nice looking working pieces. Well done.

Main Street USA

The buildings are primarily modified versions of kits from Build Your Own Main Street and Big Indoor Trains with the Ghostbusters Firehouse and an info kiosk of my own design added.

About the only changes to Main Street over the years has been the addition of popcorn carts, a few cars and the small park around the flagpole where a choir concert is underway.

But Main Street must change. It is the "black hole of Disneyland".

I know this picture is incredibly blurry, but it illustrates the problem. Look over on the right and you'll see the 4 woefully inadequate amber street lamps of Main Street. To that end, I've been collecting photos, textures and kits for some time and eventually Main Street will be rebuilt and reworked with new buildings on all 3 sides. That means the Liberty Square and Tomorrowland buildings have to be redone too. But that's the plan anyways.

More of those little things

I made Pinocchio last year. This represents my new philosophy of architecture for Disneyland. Since I no longer have the graphic design software I had been using for years, I can't create textures electronically the way I got accustomed to. Good or bad, I was forced to find a new way of doing things.

So the new method is to seek out textures (3D computer modelling name for graphics or paint) wherever I can find them but to draw up the buildings by hand on paper with a ruler or get generic, untextured pieces with Metaesequoia and Pepakura (See Matterhorn Bobsleds for an example of simple coloring).  What you can see here is wall texture from the DE Sleeping Beauty Castle kit. The pavement is actually roofing material from the same kit. The tile and shingle textures came from texture libraries (free sites) as did the tan stucco material. The other colors are solid color cardstock that I buy by the sheet at craft stores. Pinocchio and the sign came from photos I found on the internet. (I love those people who take straight, well lighted photos and post them online!) By the way, the little flowers I love to use are from floral picks sold at, you guessed it, my favorite craft store. I buy pink, white and purple picks, pluck off the flower heads and paint them with acrylics.

And yes, we've had that wonderful maroon carpeting since I was a kid!

Can't have Disneyland without these!

Or the indispensable Maps.

On the 2011 map, I planned to have a module (light blue) across the back that had the New Orleans Square Haunted Mansion and the Eurodisneyland Phantom Manor but they never made it. The skyway didn't make it either for season 1.

On the current working map, the items shown in lovely (blech) shade of green and red are things I'm planning to build and my to do list is on the left. These maps are made using Rail Ware software from MTH Electric Trains. What you don't see are several hidden layers that show me the electrical grid, important measurements like how far from the walls to place the tree stand (tree goes up first) and a template for determining the curvature of the Monorail track. Obviously the software didn't come with that capability! lol Btw, the layout got a tiny bit longer so the tracks in Frontierland got a tiny bit narrower.

The Skyway

These things are a pain at full size but mine are scaled down to 1/4 of the kit's original size!

King Arthur Carousel

The first one was this wood version which I hand painted using photos of the real horses as a guide. That is to say I printed photos close to the right size and then traced the important details to the wood blanks using carbon paper.   It moved to the Standard Gauge layout.

The current version is from Mandorfer Bastelbogen.  Yep, that's the name of the site!

The Marquee

Gotta know where we are and how long we can stay!  This is the Disney Experience kit with the light-up parts printed on vellum.  Can you see the topiaries of Mickey and Donald?

Palm tree kit

There are so many of these things! But the place would look so bad without them!  Build your own if you'd like!

Storybookland

Remember these things? They were made out of thick card and were sold as wall decorations. My first attempt at bringing Casey Junior to the park utilized mini versions of those wall hangings and a Polly Pocket castle.

The sign was made from wood letters I bought at Wal-Mart and a few pieces of Lionel rail gave the train something to adhere to. The little depot lived across the tracks but as time went on the 2 got farther and farther away from each other as Casey got pushed farther down the track!

By 2015 the time had come to upgrade! These are renderings of my Metasequoia models:

You take your 3d models over to another program called Pepakura designer which flattens them so you can make the paper model.  This produces a full color model, but it lacks shading.  It's better to have another graphic design program to put the parts through so you can add realistic textures to the parts.  That's the program I lost.  Compare the small station in the photo below with the train, castle and canal boat which lack that third step.

There I go with the foam again! But I ran out!

This was mid-summer monorail test day. The day when I had to move the furniture, bring up some of the modules and find out whether my calculations were correct and both trains could coexist peacefully! As It turned out, there's only one spot where I absolutely couldn't avoid having a joint in the Monorail track directly above the DLRR right of way. It's in front of the Matterhorn and I solved the problem by making a flexible support with a piece of brass. (See photo of 20K dock) I also found out I needed to trim the corner of Storybookland to clear BTM.

Since it didn't turn out quite the way I'd hoped, I have to mention that that big green blob on the side of the hill is supposed to represent a botanical patchwork quilt.  There were different shades of green foam rubber put on in patterns, but they're just not easy to see.

I designed those windmills to go with my Marklin HO trains but in the intervening years I've built them in O and G scale too! Don't have a clue what "scale" if any these versions are! More hot glue for water.

I'll bet I've built this little station at least a dozen times since I designed it! It keeps getting squashed!

I totally enjoy seeing your work. you do great things !!  I worked for a company that  designed and built hydraulic systems and they were deeply involved with the Florida Disneyland. As employees we had a standing invite to visit and tour the park underneath all the rides etc where all the power systems, utilities etc were. I would have enjoyed that tour.  My former employer is gone.

I always wanted to tour the "Utilidors"!  Other than the pneumatic garbage disposal system , I can't imagine they're much more exciting than corridors behind stores at a mall.  Still, it's the idea of going where visitors aren't allowed to tread that would make it exciting! 

I will have to go back through all the neat scenes and work and really think this through.  Its simply Amazing. I love Disneyland, DISNEY WORLD ORLANDO......Thanks for posting all these neat pictures and Keep Them coming....WOW!!!

Jungle Cruise/Temple of the Forbidden Eye

I started by building the temple with the expectation that it would be by itself.

So I landscaped it with that in mind. It was only later when I couldn't figure out how to do the Jungle Cruise without making it enormous that I decided to combine the two.

Note the big hunk of sandstone I carved many many years ago to look like a skull.

Looks like the kind of place only Indiana Jones would dare to enter!

An early improvement was to replace the boat hull with this plastic bathtub toy version. I also made some smiling passengers for the ride at the same time. Keep your eye on the Mark Twain in the left background.

A much darker and denser jungle grew by 2014.

2016 Revamp

This year I decided the time had come to cut the TOFE down to size. Like the Wicked Wench, the temple was always problematic due to it's height. The new version is only 60% as tall as it's predecessor. To give you some perspective, a traditional Plasticville sized person would have only come half way up in the temple doorway.  The new temple's smaller footprint also allowed for more landscaping options. I replaced the original trees that had been made with twigs and lichen with my new type. I also created a stand of bamboo using (are you ready for this?) bamboo! Barbecue skewers to be exact, onto which I attached greens from plastic aquarium plants. A coat of green paint and a few lines of white wash complete the look.

I also tried my hand at making Spanish Moss from cotton balls to hang in this tree. Take a closer look at the "broken" sections on the temple. Instead of building the paper parts (the first time around I used pebbles and ballast), I used bits of clay shale and coarse granite sand. The module only has 2 lights: one 432c lamp in a standard gauge strap headlight in a palm tree along the river, and this HO floodlight (behind the barrel) hidden in the flowers.

But my favorite part of the redo was finally having enough space to model the "lost safari". I've had the rhino ready and waiting for some time but there was just never enough space to do this.  Not to mention the fact that I could never find commercial figures who looked the part!  So these are the first of the "glueples" that have wire armatures to make them semi-posable.

From what I was told about the Florida park, it was pretty interesting to go below. Like another city, I guess.

Tomorrowland

Wasn't much to look at in 2011. The Astro Orbitor, Space Mountain and a few ugly buildings was what I started with.

The early Orbitor had a much smaller base.  Then I found 35mm film reels at a local shop and the whole thing changed before it had even seen it's first season.

The tower is just a free form conglomeration of styrofoam balls, plastic ornaments, beads, bits and pieces from my junk drawer and even a few old earrings!

The only enhancement to date was to raise it up a bit and add this area with tables and benches below.  That orange piece the sign is mounted to was a cover from an inkjet cartridge to keep it from drying out in the box.  I saved a lot of those over the years that we had that type of printer and they came in handy in Tomorrowland!

Since I wasn't happy with the ugly buildings I started with,  I doodled up some ideas for a new Tomorrowland in 2012.

And this color scheme has dominated my Tomorrowland designs ever since. But there are a few exceptions.

Early "rooftop" version of the Moonliner.  The Monorail station sat empty for awhile but there were construction crews at it's base and a Lionel crane nearby to suggest that something would eventually show up!

Space Mountain

Ummm....putting paper models in and out of storage can really wreak havoc on them.

When the time came for a rebuild I added this foamcore support structure.

I also added several layers to the veins and the little points.

I made the base section using the WDW mountain as my guide. They're grossly undersized, but those rings around it are supposed to represent the Peoplemover track.  In case you didn't know, space mountain is supposed to be a big cone shaped flying saucer.

The signpost

Not sure what else to call this thing!  It's a battery operated tap light. Or at least that's what it used to be. Inside now is a string of 110v grain of wheat bulbs. By using large styrene tubing, I had enough room to feed the wires up and out to the planets, which came in a tube (and glow in the dark even without the lights turned on).  The Red and blue sign is real, the rest is my own invention.

Monorail

If you've ever seen one of these toys in person, you may know that they sit just a bit high off the ground. Well even that wasn't high enough for my needs! I had to add an additional 2cm to the bases of the pylons to get the locomotive on the DLRR below to clear the bottom of the Monorail glideways above. That left me with a real problem as to how to have a station for it in Tomorrowland. I could have had a ridiculously long set of stairs or an escalator to carry my tiny guests up to train level. Those may have been prototypical, but they would have looked awful dumb.

So my solution was to build a small hill and have a winding path to bring the people up half way and then have them use the escalator. But uh...there wasn't room for two escalators on the platform, so I guess the up crowd has to fight with the down crowd for it's use! lol The topiaries are 54mm plastic spacemen with foam rubber glued on and the bushes are likewise bits of wood covered with foam. A few small twigs completes the look.

I miscalculated! Take a closer look. I had to chop a bit of the Sleeping Beauty Castle gardens off to make the Monorail station fit!  Oh well!  "IT" happens!  See the big rectangular bases I added to the monorail pylons to get the 6" clearance I needed?

This is the building I'm currently working on.  It will accompany the new small Moonliner.

It's a Small World (after all).

This one was designed by me. And believe me, I was plenty surprised that it looks as good as it does since I was just learning how to do this stuff!

I took the minimalist approach. Since I did all the texturing with Adobe Photo Deluxe 2, the parts rendered in Metasequoia were colorless and only what I absolutely had to design to get the job done.  This is what one of the parts pages looks like:

But nothing happens overnight and Small World was no exception. It's first appearance looked like this:

A G-scale tunnel.  Over on the right you can see how big the Moonliner is supposed to be if you build the kit without scaling it down.  The paper monorail was my design.  This layout was born from this one:

Which got it's castle from here:

Pressed for time in 2011, that simple "tunnel version" came back a bit smaller for phase 1:

But the next year I started trying to make the "kinetic sculpture" that hides the ride building at Disneyland.

Like the plastic army men sized astronauts I used at the Monorail station, plastic animals of various sizes like this swan are cheap and plentiful and make great topiaries with a bit of turf glued on.  So do a few wood cubes or beads!

The ride has a permanent line. Just like the real thing.  1:50 scale figures with HO figs acting as children.

One day this too will have to be rebuilt. The clock tower already had to be shifted forward because the Lone Ranger General's tender is just a hair wider than the James Gang's.  UV exposure, storage problems, the slightest bit of moisture, all of those things and more take their toll on paper models.  But the rebuilding and the potential for upgrades makes it all worth the effort!

So what's in Disneyland's future?

You've already seen the new Temple of the Forbidden Eye and the new New Orleans Square that will live here. But also built recently is Magnolia Park. It's a small triangular plot that will fill the space between N.O.S. and the Golden Horseshoe. It's has a fountain, 3 trees and 2 lamp posts but it will look better than the "filler" trees I've been using.

I really really dislike how the train runs along the wall in Tomorrowland. This space screams out for some flats. The Autopia will relieve some of this empty space but I'm still hoping to make a flat Carousel of Progress to fill the gap between the Skyway pylon and the Matterhorn.

This area between the end of the station and under the Monorail is where the Moonliner is moving to. It will be part of a building housing Redd Rocket's Pizza and another, The Hatmosphere will be nearby.

This bit of space between Small World and Storybookland is where I'll either make a small representation of Toontown or an expansion of Fantasyland.

This work crew has been working on Skull Rock Cove for some time now.

Adding the Monorail created this void at the front of the park. And since I hate unused space, a trait I share with Walt Disney, this area will be filled with ticket booths.

Funny story. One day in 1956, just a year after Disneyland opened, Walt discovered much to his horror that there was space within Sleeping Beauty Castle that wasn't being utilized. After calling together a few of his top designers he decided to make an inspection tour of the castle to see what they could do with the offending empty space. It was an attic area that no one had entered since the castle was completed.

Upon reaching the space, Walt and his compatriots were surprised to find the area inhabited by cats! A few had taken up residence during construction and somehow they managed to survive and multiply. Stranger still was that they noticed the walls and ceiling in this space were completely black, which made sense to no one. But they didn't wonder long as the billions upon billions of fleas that had been living off of the cats leaped off the walls and onto their new human food source!

Imagine a well dressed Walt Disney and several equally well dressed top designers vaulting down the stairs and out into Fantasyland frantically swatting off those ravenous fleas!

I hope you've enjoyed this whirlwind tour of the first 5 seasons of my little Disneyland!  Set up for the 2016 season begins on November 19th.

Becky

Hello PENNYTRAINS, WoW  you sure do some very beautiful work with your layouts I just love them I am really blown away by them too and love your colors too. I wish my old layouts looked like that and very nice Christmas themes and at Disney in Florida that sure looks very cool and neat I love it. Thanks for nice photos too longbow57ca.