Modelling Trees

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I am thinking of modelling a railroad by the ocean coast. Problem is, I have never read of any articles on how to model this kind of vegetation. For example, how would you make a palm tree???

please help… thanks!

2

Check out this thread that was just on the forum yesterday. There are couple of good suggestions for making palm trees in the thread:
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=31312

The tip by Bilby2k sounds very good, I’m going to try it myself.

Regards

Ed

3

See: http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=S&cmdtext=palm+trees&MAG=ANY

4

(I just posted this on that other thread that was referenced above, intending it for this thread.)

I saw an article in MR from July 1996 about making model Palm Trees. It was on a layout that featured a Santa Fe passenger train running along the California coast. What the author used was the twist ties from the produce section at the market. Basically, he cut them into the shape of a palm frond and cut notches along the sides. He then painted them an appropriate shade of green. He took the pieces and twisted them together to form a trunk, then wrapped them with pieces of masking tape. When he finished this, he painted the tape brown to represent the trunk of the tree. The end result looked pretty good and turned out to be far less expensive than buying palm trees. They seemed to be pretty easy to make, too!

-Joe

5

Thanks guys for helping me out… never even thought it was possible to make yourself.

jdavid93225:

How do you cut twist ties to make them look like palm fronds?
I am confused LOL

6

Basically what they did was they took the large twist ties (like on a bunch of celery) and cut slits along the sides (towards the center wire). Then they trimmed the end to a taper. They cut these at about 3 to 4 inches in length and stripped off about the last 3/4 of the material, leaving only the wire. They took about 8 or 9 of these “fronds” and then wrapped the prepped masking tape around the wires, forming the trunk. The masking tape was prepped by cutting notches into it so it looked like the top of a dog-eared cedar fence, only smaller. They then stained the tape (but I guess paint would work) to get the desired color.
This is hard to describe, but the results are well worth the effort from what I saw in the article.

7

Hey thanks! I was confused because I tried it with the small cheap garbage bag twist ties which are only like 0.5cm wide.

8

Try brown shoe polish on the masking tape.