I’m about to make a purchase for some scenic needs, and I’m curious as to what eveyone else thinks is the appropriate height for trees, specifically evergeens. I’ve done some searching and i know this has been debated before, but i didn’t seem to find any concrete answers.
I used a rule on my layout to check heights, and WS offers a tree kit of 4" - 6" high trees; using my ruler, 6 inches seemed to be very high, almost awkwardly high.
I’m just going to be creating the lush evergreen forests you seen in Colorado on the D&RGW, so I’m not looking for anything that will stick out, like if you were modeling a logging line in old growth forest area where some trees are 130 feet high.
I have made some that are 12 inch’s, so that is 87 foot and they look right. 6 Inch trees look good in a town or forest, but not as the tallest. Heck, I have a Maple Tree in the front yard that 60 foot.
Midnight Railroader’s dimensions are really pretty accurate. The problem I find is that prototype sized trees seem to make everthing else look smaller and really highlight how few acres we really model. I remind myself of how it’s generally best to work towards achieving a good overall effect and I use trees that are up to about 8" tall on my HO layout. I know they would be more suited to N scale, but they seem to communicate “big tree” to the typical viewer and that’s what I really want.
I’ve seen pictures of logging layouts where the trees are scaled to prototype dimensions. These layouts looked great, but they also had a flavor of being more like large dioramas than model railroad layouts.
For Douglas fir and the like, I make the 10 - 18 inches high for closeups scenes. Only the Caspia in a dowel gives me good results. I use Noch static grass for the “fir” look.
For Spruce and the like I make them 8 - 12 inches high. I have good luck with furnace filter on a stick and Astille flowers.
For more background scenes I reduce the size for forced perspective.
How high do your mountains tower above your rails? Typically less than 12" - 87ft in HO. Especially if you are trying to keep the mountain slopes from being absurdly steep. Your vertical terrain is just as constrained - often more so - as your horizontal terrain.
Are you modeling tree-covered slopes and ridges, or alpine (or rock) mountain tops and ridges? If tree-covered slopes, then bigger trees can be used that come closer to realistic sizes. But if you have 12" high alpine mountain tops, then 12" trees are going to look ridiculous. At the same time, when placed next to a train, a 3" tree in HO looks equally ridiculous. The right size for a tree depends upon the situation. Tree size can be tapered to smaller sizes as you get away from scale size objects to lend a type of forced perspective.
My firs and spruce trees are between 8" and 12"…lots on a limited HO layout. I agree that placing tall scale trees of that type will overpower the rest of the scenery. We’d be talking near 26"…hold your index finger on one hand about 26" above your keyboard to see what I mean.
I agree that this can be a foreground vs. background problem. Trees in the front of a scene ought to be at least nearly scale size, but as you go away from the viewer, they can be smaller.
There was a time that scale-sized trees didn’t matter to me, until I saw photos of model scenes with trees that were realistically large; those photos look a lot more like reality than I thought they would, certainly better than pictures with typical WS-sized trees, which are way too small.
see this is exactly what troubles me… the mountains wont be more than 2 feet above the trains… i dont have THAT much space.
and i understand the prototype tree dimension thing… however, I think that trees like 8" high look kind of ridiculous with HO, because the space were modeling is usually only equal to like, MAYBE a half a mile in either direction.
to help give you guys a better idea, what I’m going to be modeling is basically this:
Most of the trees are rather young and of the small varieties.
You are dealing with small mountains sides, not huge mountains.
There are no Red Woods or even large pines.
THEREFORE: Furnace Filter on a stick will make great trees fast and inexpensive. For the 4 - 8 inch variety I can make several dozen in a evening. Small ones for way up the mountain side go even faster. A few super trees and a couple large pines for effect might help.
If you are unfamiliar with “Furnace filter on a stick” pine trees, several of us will be willing to help, but Aggro Jones is the superstar with these.
One more pic, though this was not taken to show off the trees. The front trees are 5 -7 inches. The top trees are 3 inches. I put some n scale people on the top to help with the forced perspective. With a little practice, this is not too hard.
Pelle Soeberg has pictures of his layout on his webpage, and I checked that out and the trees that he used definitely dwarf the engines. They are, however, foreground trees, so they should be that tall. Our locales are a little different, however, so I can’t simply base my scenery exactly upon his, and I don’t have the space yet for that kind of expanse.
but it definitely showed me how the trees should be at least twice as tall as the trains, which are typically around 2" high, i think.
i definitely wasn’t planning on copying his work… lol. the color choice for trees and shrubs is right on for where I’m modeling, but what I was meaning is that I’m not going to do what he did in terms of the trees he used, ballast color, turf, etc.
and he’s California, and I’m doing Colorado. They’re definitely very similar, if you compare the following pictures, but they have their differences.
I judge the height of my evergreens by the particular elevation I’m modeling at the time. I model the Northern Sierra Nevada in California in HO, and my ‘elevation’ ranges from about 3,000 feet to around 6,000 feet. In the area I’m modeling, the closer one gets to ‘timberline’ which is about 6,000 feet, the taller the trees become. So at lower elevations, my evergreens are between 4" and 6" tall and at higher elevations, they’re between 6" and 10" tall. I’m modeling the 1940’s, so there is still some ‘old growth’ timber at the higher elevations.
Also, the Sierra Nevada, while not generally as high as the Colorado Rockies, (the Sierra geological block generally begins at an altitude of about 1-200 feet above sea level, while the Rockies begin on a plateau of about 5,000 feet above sea level) recieve a lot more moisture from the Pacific Ocean during the winter, which makes for a generally more ‘lush’ topography from lower elevations to ‘timberline’.
