Scenery & Structure Projects for Train Layouts

I’M SURE it will come as no surprise to you that many of the questions we get from Model Railroader readers are about scenery and structures. After all, both are key components of bringing a model railroad to life. Without them, all you have is a piece of plywood, track, and trains. For some people, that’s plenty. A rich imagination fills in everything else. But for others, those basic building blocks are only the beginning of an empire. By adding some grass and trees to your layout, you start to create a sense of time and place. Adding a building or two – or 17 –gives your trains a reason to run and customers to serve. Adding roads starts to tie the transportation network together. And nothing brings things to life like…

>> THOUGH PAPER, STRIPWOOD, AND RESIN are still viable modeling materials, styrene has clearly become the most common product today’s model railroaders use to build layout structures. Styrene, a type of plastic, is available in many different thicknesses, sizes, and styles, including strips, beams, tubes, and sheets made to replicate clapboard, brick, and other textures. Suppliers include Evergreen Scale Models, JMD Plastics, JTT, Midwest Products, Plastruct, and The N Scale Architect. Modelers find styrene is easy to cut with a hobby knife or to simply score and snap. The edges can be easily dressed using a file or sanding stick. Styrene bonds quickly and easily using a small amount of plastic-compatible adhesive such as cyanoacrylate (CA) or plastic cement. Even delicate-looking assemblies are durable enough to withstand handling or modification. Holes or…

>> MANY MODELERS SPEND HOURS painstakingly detailing locomotives and weathering freight cars, and that’s understandable. These are the stars of the show on a model railroad. But when it comes time to bring their stage to life and add scenery to a layout, several of those same people will cringe. With the wealth of scenery products available today, it’s easier than ever to have a realistically scenicked model railroad. Gone are the days of dyed sawdust, lichen, and flat plastic trees. Today we’re blessed with ground foam in an amazing assortment of colors and textures, clump and fine leaf foliage, and great looking trees of all description (some even have realistic wood trunks!) If you’ve put off scenery on your model railroad, give these techniques a try. The scene shown above is…

>> ALTHOUGH SCENERY on my HO scale Bona Vista RR is nearly complete, I specifically reserved space to include a small downtown district that featured structures and details typical of towns set in the Upper Midwest. And from the beginning I planned to name my town Westcott, in honor of Model Railroader’s former editor and one of my model railroading heroes, Linn Westcott. Perhaps building a town named after a person of such stature was the reason I avoided doing it for so long. I wanted to be absolutely sure my modeling efforts in this area would yield a scene with a character worthy of its namesake. Westcott is situated against the backdrop in a corner of my 15 x 35-foot layout. At its widest point, the space is only about 36"…

>> WHEN MY HO SCALE Union Pacific Daneville & Donner River layout first appeared in the March 2005 issue of Model Railroader magazine, I was quite thankful to hear complimentary remarks. However, I was puzzled why so many people considered my model railroad to be “highly detailed.” On the contrary, my layout doesn’t include many details at all, yet that didn’t prevent viewers from believing it does. From these comments I concluded that people will sometimes mistakenly think that a realistic-looking layout must include numerous details. But in my experience, adding lots of details – large or small – won’t guarantee realism. More often, extensive detailing detracts from an otherwise authentic scene. To clarify my point, imagine a onesquare-mile real-world setting that you’d like to model in HO (1:87.1) scale. In order…

>> WHETHER YOU’RE ON A DATE, at a business meeting, or hosting a model railroad open house, you always want to make a good first impression. Though we have many beautifully finished scenes on our HO scale Milwaukee, Racine & Troy club layout, the first things visitors see when they enter the room is plywood benchwork, and unballasted track. To give the entrance some visual interest, I built a low-relief coal-fired power plant. Modeling the Wisconsin Electric Power Co. plant was more than building Walthers Tri-State Power Authority, kit no. 933-3055, and plunking it on the layout. The kit’s footprint is 10" x 137⁄8", which would cover a siding and the MR&T’s double-track main line. A better option was to turn the kit into a low-relief structure and expand it horizontally…