Well, I tried to respond on MR, and the link they give gets a 404, and ASKmr@mrmag bounces.
So…I was reading the article in this month’s issue on scratchbuilding the loading ramp, when I got to filling the ramp up.
STOP! Or, to quote a well-known song, “hold it right there, ke-id.”
He puts broken packing peanuts in, then puts sawdust and thinned white glue. DO NOT DO THIS, until you have tested the packing peanuts. For a good number of years now, a lot of them are made to recycle out of corn. Put some water on one before you do this. In fact, just putting one peanut to your tongue will tell you the answer: if it’s corn, it will begin to dissolve on your tongue.
Don’t do that unless they’re plastic, not corn, or you’ll have a sticky, slushy mess.
I think you can use spray adhesive with those ‘starch’ biodegradable peanuts… or spray them with cheap clear coating.
A rookie mistake by MR staff not to mention this, though…
Perhaps not like you were expecting, but I have several of these around my layout…(disclaimer: No peanuts, sawdust, or white glue was harmed in any of the examples shown below.)
…and of course there are loading ramps for livestock, too…
…and lots of industries use them too, even though there’s no ramp included…
“This month” meaning next month? September 2021 issue ?
MRR November 2020 issue on page 30 shows making one of these from Rockite expansion cement. Styrene was used to construct the mold.
End result is the appearance of a poured concrete loadng ramp.
Good post of your real World experience. If using these packaging foam pieces use non water based adhesives and poured fillers. Or make sure they’re actually plastic.
The non plastic ones are cellulose based and corn waste is one source of the cellulose. The idea is the cellulose is biodegradable. Compostable “plastic” waste bags are made of similar stuff. From an engineering perspective this is a step backwards in terms of utility. The real problem is people’s habits in not disposing of polymerized plastics carefully enough to ensure they can be recycled. So we are soon to be entirely deprived of “single use plastics”. Bizarre. Like refusing to build nuclear power plants because we can’t get rid of the waste. Yes we can.
I built one a few years ago using foam peanuts (don’t know if they were the edible kind ) and then cut sections of wood from a 1/8x1/8 of balsa wood of proper length to cover the peanut form including both sides and the end. Used similar pieces to make a ramp. Gave them a color that “looks like wood.” No piers so it was a solid piece all around. Not entirely typical, but almost certainly done somewhere. Not the most artistic, but works for me.
Mike
Edible and safe to ingest mean different things to me. Judging from the description of what water based glue does to the cellulose “peanuts” I’m pretty sure they fit neither.
It did occur to me to wonder whether just letting the gluey mess set and dry out might have worked. Once dry just spray with a lacquer or similar to keep further moisture out then proceed to complete the loading dock exterior as originally planned.
Edible was meant to be a bad joke I did use Elmer’s glue and build it on a small piece of foam core which is my go to as a base for the many scenes on the layout. It makes it easier to build, landscape and detail on my workbench. If that scene needs to be removed and replaced or repaired it can go back to the workbench.
Mike
Reading the article I concluded that for many building this loading ramp starting with a foam block of the right size would be much easier. The author deliberately chose not to and ended up building essentially prototypically: build a frame and fill it with “dirt”.
Most model railroad scenery techniques are intended to create a visual result and need not be actually built the way the prototype is.