Freight Yard Junk

Freight Yard Junk...this is not Up Town Funk. There's a right way and a wrong way to model junk. Industrial bric-a-brac. Freight-yard detritus. When you see 'the right way' you'll know it. It's not about placing a 45-gallon drum here, and one here, and one here like some sort of HO-scale Bob Ross painting full of happy little trees. This stuff builds up over time, gets pushed out of the way for...more stuff to build up. It's layers of someday stuff that gradually gets forgotten, as long as the vehicles and trains can travel through it, sometimes in close quarters. 

The most precise modelling technique to reproduce this effectively would employ surgical precision with forceps placement and gluing of each piece, perhaps using a square-foot-by-square-foot grid approach to get the judicious junk juxtaposition of the prototype.

This video shows a 1969 Chrysler Newport chasing a 1973 Triumph Spitfire. Before the video even starts, you just know that the stolen Spitfire is going to win. Spoiler alert - a Seaboard Coast Line train gets between the two cars (speeded-up video keeps it safe!) and the Smokeys apprehend the Chrysler's outsmarted occupants. The location may be around Columbia, South Carolina, and the timeframe is five years past my circa 1970 modelled prototype.

Here are some faded screenshots presented as aides-memoires for me, next time I fill in a vacant part of the layout with model junk.