I am begining to build a new realistic HO layout in my basement. Model railroading is not new to me but on this scale it is.
What I need to know is how to make it look real.
I was wondering what I need to make the folowing.
For tunnels and retaining walls you can do a lot of your own casting if you have the patience to carve your own stone blocks into the stuff, assuming your walls and tunnel portals won’t be poured “concrete”. A metal straightedge and a #11 knife blade (pick your knife) are all you need. Hit the plaster while it’s set up, but still moderately soft. The edges where you carve your block lines will fracture a bit, giving you a texture of smoothly cut but slightly weathered limestone. It’s not hard. All you need is sheet styrene, and you can save a bundle over buying pre-made.
As far as mountain go, there are different types. Folded, fault-block, etc. A short course in geology as it relates to landforms would be handy. For instance, the Rockies and Sierras are fault-block mountains, whereas the Appalachians are folded. All this influences how the rocks are layered in the mountains if you want to go for maximum effect.
As for talus piles (those loose rocks at the bottom of the slope), I just crumbled up bits of nearly-hardened plaster from the bucket, dribbled it at the top of the slope and let if fall where gravity took it, just like the real thing.
What I did On my layout is to use rubber molds and plaster when using this message you can also form it to go around curved areas but you also have to allow the plaster time to set up after it has set up you can use dies or stains to then color the rock the three most used stains on my layout are black, yellow, and brown.
UP3593