Philosophy Friday -- Mountain Railroading

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
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“Mountain Railroading”

Mountains and railroads just seem to go together. Due in large part, no doubt, to the bountiful resources there to be obtained and which need to be hauled out and shipped to somewhere else. Model Railroads and mountains just seem to go together too. It would seem that many model railroaders are drawn in by the mountain mystique and motif. (I’ve heard tell that there may be a few who model other themes, but I’m pretty sure they don’t number more than one or two-- maybe three at most… [:-^] )

Over the years there have been many attempts made to capture the mystery and allure of the mountain setting in different mediums and contexts. From the majestic floor-to-ceiling renditions of John Allen; Allen McClelland and Tony Koester’s lush and expansive slopes of West Virginia; John Kalin’s beautiful San Juan Southern, set in the Rocky Mountains; Howard Zane’s exquisitely scenicked Piermont Division-- just to mention but a few.

Each of these layouts does its best to depict the mountain region in which it resides. And each of these layouts uses a different combination of techniques to achieve the effect. Combining backdrops, low-relief flats, mesh and plaster hardshell, pink foam, and other structural techniques. They also employ a variety of techniques to model trees, rocks, vegetation, streams, waterfalls, and other scenic features found in their respective locales. Not to mention the many opportunities to show off their modeling skills with bridges, tunnels, and twisty mountain roads.

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A model railroad without mountains? We need those mountains, tunnels and bridges, if only for the purpose of disguising sharp radii and loops.

Most of the layouts I have seen are set somewhere in the mountainous regions of the world, hardly a harbor scene in the flat lands or cityscapes. All of my previous layouts where just like that, with my "mountains being build in the traditional way - wire mesh and plaster cloth and rock castings.

My layout “in being” will be different - strictly a city scene, depicting a suburban train station, somewhere in northern England/Scotland. The reason? Well, mainly just to be different from what I´ve done before, a new challenge to capture a new atmosphere.

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John:

Again, an interesting subject, and I daresay you’ll get as many answers and techniques as there are mountains to model.

For myself, I model a railroad passing over the northern Sierra Nevada Mountains of California–a narrow but steep mountain range that historically was called ‘impassable’ by early pioneers. In fact the first railroad to surmount the range (Central Pacific) had to resort to ‘ridge-top’ building instead of ‘canyon-bottom’ construction to surmount this difficult range.

My own Yuba River Sub is constructed in the same manner–generally following the Yuba River watershed, but built more on ‘ridge-top’ construction. Theoretically, the elevations modeled are between 3,000 and 7,000 feet–from the largely clay-based foothills to the craggy granite Sierra peaks.

Construction for the most part is the ‘hardshell’ technique, using foam or wood forms, crumpled newspaper and plaster cloth. Lightweight but still pretty sturdy. Some rock castings are made from thinned Sculptamold (Hydrocal sets up too fast in my particular climate), Cripplebush Rubber Rocks for one of the large mountain faces (the Sierra Buttes), and right now, I’m investigating the Bragdon foam method for some other large rock-faces I’ve got to work on.

Trees are a mix of commercial and hand-made. Since I model both low and high elevations, the lower-elevation deciduous trees are made from Supertrees and Fall-colored foam (I’m in the process of replacing most of my ‘commercial’ Fall trees), and higher elevation evergreens are either commercial or made using the dowel-furnace filter method. Most of my trees are ‘background’, so I haven’t done much real detailing on them. However, I will need some large evergreen foreground trees, and I’ll be using detailed doweling and individually inserted ‘fern’ for the branches. Haven’t gotten that far yet, though.

As to the ‘puff-ball’ question, it’s a non-answer

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My Dad died when I was 14 and a year later, Mom sold off our 15 sets of Lionel because she said we kids wouldn’t be interested in toy trains any more. Shortly after, I picked up my first copy of Model Railroader with a double page color spread of a scene on John Allen’s Goree and Daphetid. That got me interested again, especially in mountain railroading. Built a few feet of an HO layout with money from a weekend and summer job. Planned a massive curved trestle in the corner. Then I got more interested in making movies, the only “hobby” that could possibly have more aspects to it that model railroading.

But when I got a TV newsreel job and moved away from home, movies of a sort were work and trains seemed interesting for play. Especially mountain railroads. I took a trip to to study mountain railroads and how they cross passes, crossed the continental divide 14 times including following the roadbed of the as it was before t

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– Do you have a model railroad in a mountain setting? If so, what are your favorite techniques for building and scenicing mountains? What about rocks and trees and roads and all of the secondary stuff that goes along with creating a convincing setting?

*** Yes. I use anything that works. The more materials and techniques you use, the more real it looks. Foam, plaster castings, ground foam, real dirt, ground goop, lychen. I favor plaster rock castings for rock outcroppings the most.

– Are there techniques you especially don’t like?

*** Not sure I like trying to carve rocks out of builders foam. I think it is very hard to get it to look right. However I am going to try it on my new upper level modules.

– As an aside, I’m interested in your opinion of so-called “Puff-ball” trees. I’ve heard a number of comments, both pro and con regarding “puff-ball” trees, and I’m wondering how you feel about them?

*** I personally don’t like them too much unless they are done really well. Having said that, our club layout uses them almost exclusively and because the layout is very large, they do look good.

– What other techniques for creating tree-lined mountains do you think work well (or not) ??

*** Individual model trees look better and you can space them out more. But you have to build them yourself and it takes time.

– Another thing to think about and maybe comment on is how to handle the “near” / “distance” aspects of mountains. In the space that most people have to work with its difficult to do both at the same time and convincingly-- or else just do the “best you can” and go with it.

*** Force the perspective by using smaller things at the back. Smaller buildings, smaller trees, smaller wood for trestles and bridges, photo backdrops, etc.

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John,

(I am writing this response an exercise to see if I can do it in a half hour including picture up loads)

Mountains… Yes, lots of them.

I built my last layout around a mountain theme. It was a folded dog bone design with a five foot deep John Allen inspired canyon. I cut a huge hole in the bench work and went for it. I used screen and Hydrocal for the base and then hand craved rocks from Hydrocal. The r5ocks on the layout took a couple of years of carving on and off to complete.

I colored the rocks with the WS “leopard spot” technique. While I was shooting for a western US look, I think that coloring and the rock shapes created by hand carving, ended up looking more Colorado or even European , than my original goal. For trees I used super trees painted to look like aspens (another faux pas, as they generally occur in CA on only the Eastern slopes). I really like the fine detail in these trees.

In general I was very happy with how this layout looked. I tore it down seven years ago to build an Ops based layout.

Here are a couple of shots of the hand carved canyon:

The new layout is more prototype based although still on a freelance theme. A combination of various scenes of several CA foothill/mountain short lines. This time the scenes have less width and less vertical space due to the double deck design. I decided to use the hydrocal and screen method again on this layout but I went with rock molds to produce the rock faces.

&nb

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My Questions for Today Are:

– Do you have a model railroad in a mountain setting? If so, what are your favorite techniques for building and scenicing mountains? What about rocks and trees and roads and all of the secondary stuff that goes along with creating a convincing setting?

– Are there techniques you especially don’t like?

– As an aside, I’m interested in your opinion of so-called “Puff-ball” trees. I’ve heard a number of comments, both pro and con regarding “puff-ball” trees, and I’m wondering how you feel about them?

– What other techniques for creating tree-lined mountains do you think work well (or not) ??

– Another thing to think about and maybe comment on is how to handle the “near” / “distance” aspects of mountains. In the space that most people have to work with its difficult to do both at the same time convincingly-- or else just do the “best you can” and go with it.

1}modeling mountains- I model what I see around me and here in my part of Upstate NY, and here we have hills and mountainous terrain. Tree covered. Across the border in PA there are rock cut style moutnains. I have a very small HO layout, but it has a hill or mountain on one end with a tunnel through it. On the hill or mountain top I have a cute little waterwheel shack mill that I use with a cute small lumber mill storage facility as an old water-fed lumber mill. The water wheel is fed by a stream that then follows down the mountain side to the flat part of the layout where it goes under a RR bridge 1 inch off the water.

2}construction used and dislikes- I used blue insulation foam board and scraps of white foam to shape the mountain side/tunnel. I don’t particularly care for plastercloth hardshell scenery, as I wanted the moutain to be easily “lift-off-able” should I need to access t

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Model railroads sort of “need” curves, yet prototype railroads seem to work to minimize them. When you consider prototypes, most track is straight. If we were to model those miles and miles of straight track, we’d need HUGE rooms for our layouts (5 HO scale miles is about the length of a 1:1 football field). However, 1 mile of HO scale track winding through mountainous landscape can easily fit in a typical bedroom, and it will be more interesting than a long straight prairie run. In the mountains, curves are mandatory for prototypes, so that is what we gravitate to in our layouts.

As mentioned before, mountains also provide a method for disguising the big U turns that often manifest themselves at the end of the layout, and they are thus useful in creating the illusion of a railroad that goes on well beyond the layout space. They also allow for sort of terracing a layout, thus using vertical space as well as horizontal space. They add a sense of drama/peril to a layout by creating opportunities for trains moving on narrow ledges and over gullies and canyons on carefully crafted bridges.

One other thing that mountains give us are places for tiny little isolated communities, with quirky hillside structures and little mom and pop type industries. As models to build, these are a lot of fun.

Another thing to consider is to think about railroad artwork; most of it seems to depict trains in the mountains, and many of the most influential model railroads are set in mountain scenery. It also seems that most of the current excursion railroads are stretches of winding mountain track. These factors surely influence our decisions as to our own scenery choices.

Regarding making mountains, I’m an old fashioned hard-shell scenery guy. Then I use home made latex molds to cast rocks and rocky cliffs. I have a couple of hunks of coal that I use as the form for my rock molds.

Trees are almo

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Ha! [:-^] Real mountains are too tall to have trees on them. Here in the Rocky Mountain states we call those foot hills. The trees give out in Colorado about 11,000 feet. In Wyoming it is about 9,800. The dryer the climate the lower the tree line. I think treeline is about 8,000 feet in Arizona.

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To tell the truth, I’ve been yearning to have a mountain railroad since I got into model railroading. There’s something about scenes like this:

http://www.railpictures.net/viewphoto.php?id=335755&nseq=2

that just speaks to me. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s something I want to capture. I suspect it may be the dramatic appeal of the scenery - remote locations, the railroad the only link to civilisation, the sheer fortitude, determination and sacrifice needed to put the railroad through such a tricky location. Looking at a train running across a flat plain with towns on the horizon doesn’t really seem to have the same challenge associated with it.

To answer John’s questions:

My whole layout is focusing on a mine nestled at the base of a mountain, between the mountainside and the river (like the line in the photo). I’m planning to use ‘glueshell’ scenery - white bedsheets soaked in diluted PVA, over galvenised garden mesh to form the slopes. Rock outcroppings & boulders will be plaster castings. This will by my first attempt at mountain scenery, and I’m looking forward to learning. I’m also considering Zip Texturing for dirt.

No techniques I don’t like as yet - but I’m sure I’ll find a couple. I don’t think I’d have the patience or eye neeeded for hand-carving, though.

Unfortunately, puff-ball trees won’t really work for Colorado. Most of the trees I’ve seen dotting the mountainside in photos are cone-shaped (e.g. pine, spruce, etc). On the other hand, a variation using shaped puff-balls…hmmm…

With regards to the near/far aspect of the mountains, I’m planning to have the mountainside continue up to the top of the backdrop, then cut off there. The ‘front’ of the layout is the river side of the tracks, and will have a riverbank with a 1/2" or so of water running along on top of the fascia.

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For the sake of brevity, I’ll chime in on only two of the questions posed by this week’s thread: puff-ball trees and portraying distance.

Trees. With regard to “puff-ball” trees, that approach to representing dense forest is best characterized as “old technology.” While the appearance of a puff-ball tree-covered hillside may be considered as a sort of “representation” of the real thing, in all honesty it bears only a marginally passing resemblance to such, especially when viewed in person.

While, if viewed from a considerable distance, most real, well forested, hillsides present a more-or-less solid canopy of green, when viewed closer up - as is the case with our modeled renditions - the individual treetops display far less uniformity and a much more irregular structure.

Thus, the best forested hillsides on layouts today are represented through the mass planting of separate, heavily branched, model trees, like those created from SuperTree armatures. When well executed, this and similar approaches result in a highly realistic and believable background.

Probably the best approach for model railroaders to employ if they wish to portray the impression of reality for say eastern mountainous terrain is to have the ridgeline of their nearest range of hills not run directly into the backdrop, but instead rise slightly above eyelevel, roll over and then descend slightly, before contacting the rear of the scene. This should be backed up by a good quality photo backdrop depicting whatever more distant scene the hobbyist wishes. Planting trees passing over the top of the ridgeline will convey a far more realistic impression; because that’s the way hills (or even mountains) appear in the real world.

Distance. For more years than I can count, the term “forced perspective” has been bandied about in this hobby. It suggests that through the use of certain modeling techniques one can convincingly fool the view

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Nice topic. I live on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, which is about as flat as Kansas.

http://cs.trains.com/trccs/themes/trc/utility/

There are railroads here that would be fun to model, but as has been stated, it’s bloody hard to figure out how to hide the return loops, staging tracks and other model railroad necessities. But I grew up closer to the Piedmont, and spent a year or so living the dream not far from Harpers Ferry, and I love going to the mountains for hiking, camping, and of course, railfanning. So my layout is themed on the Western Maryland, which traversed the Alleghenies in Maryland, as well as Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

As much as I enjoy prototypical operations, I also really enjoy model railroading. The idea of a long, linear layout is appealing, but there’s something about those loops and bridges and tunnels that wakes up the 11 year old embedded in this old guy’s soul. Plus, since my train room is smallish, I need those flips and twists to get some running time between switching locations.

!(http://lh6.ggpht.com/_ERLF7TTPvmA/TDVRb5SlBHI/AAAAAAAALRw/liToJXLga10/ReconstructionPh2 078.jpg)

I also really like the challenge of isolating particular scenes within that roller coaster, and creating even more of an illusion of distance through the judicious use of blue foam, Sculptamold, trees and details.