I am considering a long retaining wall for my layout. It will be about 3-4" high and up to 6 feet long. It can be brick or concrete. I am considering making my own but looking for ideas on construction materials. One option is styrene for concrete. I am also willing to cast it with plaster but don’t have any molds. In looking on Walther’s website I see JV Materials makes sheets of brick 4 3/4" high by 8 1/2" long. The pictures are B&W and don’t show much. I am hoping not to paint this much brick by hand. I also see that Plastruct has a patterned red brick sheet but no deminsions are given. Has anyone made a retaining wall this long and if so, how did you do it ?
Using individual castings will give the best look. This would also allow for slight curves if needed and staggering of the heights for any elevation changes. There are many molds available. I like to use ones that have a stone wall section and pilaster. These can run many feet and still look prototypical. They can be glued to wood or foam for placement.
I have carved several walls directing into premixed lightweight dry wall seam cement. I put about 1/8" coat on top of scenery(plaster or foam). After about 2 hours you can carve it with a knife. It will stay carvable for a couple of days. I then paint it with artist’s accrylics.
BogP40,
Who makes the retaining wall brick or wood molds? I can find lots of rock molds, but no others.
Thanks!
This is a short shot of a wall which is about 3 feet long. It’s made from coffee stirrers, glued to a styrene strip as a base. I used a white wood stain mixed with a bit of India Ink for color. The artwork is a decal I made from a downloaded thumbnail picture, printed on decal paper on my inkjet computer.
This one is double-sided, as the track descends into the tunnel with the same elevation on either side. I used a rock mold from Dave Frary at www.mrscenery.com for the castings. The specific mold is “cut stone wall,” but he has other choices, too.
To finish the castings, I first sprayed them with cheap gray primer from Lowe’s. Then I brushed on a fairly dark India Ink wash until I got the detail level I wanted. The ink wash really highlights this particular mold (made with Hydrocal) and takes very little time to do. The mold is about 3 by 8 inches.
I built long walls for my HO layout by carving 1" thick pink foam board. I made some in natual rock and others in cut block form. It is pretty easy to carve anything you want in foam. I made tunnels and stone arch bridges as well. I paint a base coat on them and then highlight certain individual rocks or blocks with another color and finally finish off the cracks between with a light color wash the same way you would with brick mortar.
Doc
For concrete you might like to look here…
http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/914154/ShowPost.aspx
Retaining walls… this could get long so you might want to take another look at it tomorrow when I’ve had time to add to it.
In H0 3" =21’ and 4" = 28’… which means quite deep cuts or embankments. This is not a problem. the wall just needs to be heavy enough.
RR retaining walls come in several construction methods…
- timber piling
- timber cribbing
- masonry
- dressed stone
- undressed stone
- concrete blocks
- concrete sections
- poured concrete - backfilled
- concrete cribbing
- concrete piling
- steel piling
- steel piling backed by concrete
- steel wire cages full of stone. (This seems to be the latest variation on cribbing)
- sandbags (temporary - for a few years)
- H steel girders driven vertically with beams/ties slotted horizontally between
- Old rail driven vertically with rail/beams/ties horizontally behind
- I’ll probably think of some more later.
Very long walls may be a combination of a number of the above. this applies especially where there have been repairs or modernisations.
Piling is almost always vertical. The rest may be vertical or may have a batter… ie they slope away from the void towards the top. An external batter does not mean that the inside face (gainst the erth) is sloped.
Most retaining walls are cantilevers… they are like a fence… the fencepost in the ground holds the fence gainst horizontal pressures while the fence panels are the cantilever… the difference is that the wall doesn’t have posts but is continuous below ground.
Some retaining walls are L shaped with the foot of the L behind the vertical
In the November MRR, page 40, Andy Sperandeo mentioned a John Allen method from yesteryear - carved linoleum.
I recall having done some linoleum carving to create stone walls back when I was still modeling the NYC. The most useful tools were V and U gouges, and the surface could be textured with a ball peen hammer.
Now that the idea is back in my mind, I’ll probably use it to model the stonework I need. Commercial products just don’t look right for my prototypes.
Chuck (modeling stone-faced fills and embankments in central Japan in 1964)
Hey Dave, I have warned you before. You are going to wear your fingers down to short stubs with all that typing mate!!! What will you do once you have only stub fingers left?[:-,]
The question has occured to me “Why retaining walls”?
Obviously for modellers the answers are because they can look good, hide the edge of the modelled area and we like them… among other things.
With real RR they are relatively expensive structures. Probably close to tunnels in first cost and maintenance.
So then I tought about where they are used.
- above RR track… to hold up ground and structures on it.
- below RR track… to hold up the right of way.
- sometimes a step is formed and both occur.
All very obvious… but why a retaining wall?
There appear to be six reasons for them. (That I can think of so far… please add your own…)
- because real estate is expensive so that purchasing the land to form a conventional fill or cut would be expensive. this occurs mainly in cities.
- because land is not available for track widening … the RR is already located and property has been developed around it. The only way to get more space for track is to switch from having a fill or cut to levelling the required space and using a retaining wall.
- because land is not available for grade seperation… the RR is already located and property has been developed around it. The only way to seperate the grade is to go straight up or down between retaining walls. This may be combined with numbers of bridges.
- because the angle of repose (the angle at which soil/rock refrains from sliding down hill) is too shallow, too expensive or not practical. This varies from loose sand that is useless for cuts or fills via a cut or fill that might be shallow or low but the necessary slope of the banks would take too much land (and possibly still be unreliable) to the geology being solid but too vertical… it just wouldn’t be practical to cut out or fill slopes along a mountain side… however solid and free from slip the rock may be. (Of course where possible RR leave the
I’ve been thinking about the above post off and on all day and didn’t notice this at first.
The answer is simple… I’ll stop getting told off for scratching my nose [(-D]
After searching further, I found the City Classics Modular Concrete Retaining Wall. Each section is just over 8.5" long and two sections list for $9.98 on Walthers website.
http://www.walthers.com/exec/productinfo/195-601
this is very close to what I was looking for. I’ll take some more measurements before I head in this direction. They are plastic and not cast from ceramic or plaster. For concrete this should be fine but I suspect a casting would look more realistic.
If you get one to try you might see how an exterior wall paint (Sandtex in the UK) looks on it… try some on the insde face first. It would add texture as well as base colour. If you want to be fussy you might then rub off the texture in all the cement lines to differentiate the different material.
MisterBeasley,
What brand decal paper is that? I have some Walthers decal paper that I am considering using in my inkjet printer but I am afraid I will ruin my printer.
I would first build it from a 1 x 4 board and paint it to appear as a concrete wall. Later, if I found something that I couldn’t resist I might buy a comercial product and replace it. If you wanted a uniform masonry appearance, then I would find a brick pattern and print it on a color printer. Then I would cut it out and affix it to the board. It would be an easy thing to cover over your board later with a comercial product if you find something you got to have. Good Luck.
It’s not a name-brand paper, just something I found at an LHS. It’s designed for inkjet printers. You won’t hurt the printer with it. The only trick is that you really need something like Microscale’s Liquid Decal Film to coat the inkjet decal, or it will just disintegrate when it hits the water.
I’ve done other decals on a nice, smooth metal surface, and they came out very clean. This old, worn-out look fits the wood fence very nicely. The decal is printed on “clear” decal paper, so all the white part comes out clear. I painted a rectangle on the fence with cheap white acrylic craft paint before I applied the decal.
I picked up some sheet styrene, some 1/4" I beam, some 1/4" C channel and other styrene. I am going to sandwich some 1/8" hardboard (in 2.75" x 4" pieces) between sheet styrene and then framed with C channel and I beams. I have sheet styrene with a pattern that will be on the layout side and smooth styrene on the side that can’t be seen. I think it will look Ok. One thing I am thinking is how folks create the look of graffiti. I’ve seen some pictures but don’t know what folks use.
Something that I have not seen mentioned & might be worth consideration for such a long wall is covering thin styrene with the building paper sold by Micro Mark & other manufacturers as well. It has an adhesive backing and can be had with several designs such as random cut stone, concrete block, red or yellow brick & several other varieties. This may prove to be the most “cost effective” approach. I’ve used these on several buildings and they looked pretty good. If you take your time you can make almost invisible seams between the pieces. I do, however, use some additional adhesive such as Elmer’s white glue to ensure that the paper stays put. Tweet
I plan to have I beams every 4" so seams won’t be an issue. I am thinking of Elmers glue to glue the styrene to the hardboard. I cut the hardboard last night into blocks. I should be able to cobble something together in the next few days to post a sample.
Hey Art!
That is one seriously gorgeous rock face! How about a little step-by-step tutorial thread on how you did it?
And the small retaining wall is no slouch, either…