Creating A Small World

More newcomers to model railroading are discouraged by the thought of making scenery than by any other aspect of the hobby. They will tackle carpentry, wiring, and complicated layouts even if they've had no experience before, and will operate a complex pike like real-life dispatchers. But they keep saying that they haven't had time to get around to scenery yet; they want to wait until trackwork is definitely finished. Since it never really is definitely fin- ished—everyone plans certain changes ahead to improve the layout or enlarge it—scenery making is postponed and postponed again.

A primary factor contributing to this hesitancy about scenery is the sight of magnificently scenicked layouts in stores, manufacturers' showrooms, hobby shops, and magazine pictures. Mountains, waterfalls with real water, lakes with boats, dams, bridges over rushing streams, mountains, tunnels, realistic cuts and fills, retaining walls, streets, stores, paved highways, dirt roads—these layouts have Everything. They have so much that the amateur says, "I can never do anything like that!"
  
He must remember that the people who made these beautiful layouts are professionals; they earn their living doing that job. The hobbyist, on the other hand, has an hour or so on some evenings and perhaps a little more time on week-ends. He wants to spend some of his time operating his trains. He would like some scenery because he has striven for realism in his locomotives and cars, in his track and method of operations, but none of these look quite real on a bare table. When he pictures the professional layouts, he realizes how much time they would take and postpones scenery once more. He looks at the model railroad magazines and sees pictures of more beautiful scenic layouts, and he thinks that these were made by amateurs like himself, not professionals. But if he reads enough, he finds out that one man famous for his scenery has earned his living doing scenery for theaters, another has made life masks, etc. These are people with special qualifications for the job, so he is discouraged again because he has no special qualifications.

Perhaps he has finally decided to start, and the first step is to get rid of the bare wood showing on his table top. He gets some green paint and some commercially prepared imitation grass.
When he is finished he has something that looks like a billiard table top and not like country through which his railroad should travel. So he gives up on scenery.

There is no need to give up. But there are a few things you should learn before you can approach the making of scenery with the enthusiasm and interest it deserves, the same enthusiasm with which you tackled layout. First, most of the beautiful pictures in the magazines show only one small part of a layout that happens to be finished. You can be quite sure that the rest of the owner's pike is pretty bare and much like your own. Why not follow his example and make scenery for a little bit at a time? The job is a small one and thus not completely forbidding like the magnificent layouts in show windows. You can finish it in not many hours of work and gain great satisfaction and encouragement from its completion. And it is just about the cheapest thing you can do in improving your layout—less expensive by far than new trains, cars, switches, track, and so on.

A final consoling thought: nature is usually not very neat. A mountain is a tumbled, irregular mass. A stream wanders all over the place, searching out the lower ground levels. Tunnel entrances are dirty, culverts rusty, lawns have bare spots, barns are faded, fences are broken. The two rails of a track may be clean and true and neat, but the scene alongside consists of weeds, rocks, dirty weather- beaten sheds, junk. Look at the scene along any three-mile stretch of road and see how generally messy, though charming, nature and man combined have made it. The trouble with the man's green billiard table was that it was too uniformly green, too uniformly flat. If he put a cement road across it, he probably forgot to put a single drop of oil on its surface, a single weed by its side. No wonder it didn't look real!

Therefore, if you are worried that you might be a little sloppy when you turn artist, remember that the things you are trying to reproduce are a little sloppy, too, instead of looking machine-made. Look around your layout and choose one small section on which to begin making scenery. Pick one that already has some good scenery on it.

Yes, you already have scenery, for stations, water tanks, signals, stockyard, loading devices are all forms of scenery. They may not look like scenery with nothing else done for them, but they can serve as focal points for added scenic effects that will make them look as if they really belonged on a railroad.

One of the first accessories anyone buys is a station, so let's start with that. You have a station of some kind at a point along your track—large or small passenger station, freight station, or a combination. If it is a passenger station in a village or town it needs a parking lot near it. Draw on the board an area for the parking lot, cover it with glue or dark-brown paint, and sift ballast material, sand, or crushed slate on it. (You can buy crushed slate in different colors at your hobby store, but homemade material will do just as well.) If you have none of these, use some sifted dirt itself to simulate dirt, or sawdust dyed to the color you want with Tintex dye or stain. But don't make the surface too even; no dirt or gravel parking lot is even.

With a stick or pencil put in a few ruts, especially at the entrance; make a couple of bumps and potholes for cars to break their springs in. Do not make the edges too even, or the color too uniform. After the base material is set, add a few drops of adhesive here and there, where cars would be parked, sift onto them some black sand or dirt or coffee grounds or gravel. Smear it around a little so it won't be too even, and you will have the stains where crankcases have dripped oil, as all crankcases do.

If your parking lot is paved with blacktop, it will be smoother, of course. Use black emery paper to cover the area, but keep the edges a little irregular. Or get black asbestos furnace powder at your hardware store, mix with water to a thick paste, and pave the place yourself with a putty knife. This has the dull finish of blacktop paving. Since this is a neater lot, it may have white lines marked where the cars should park. Paint them in with a small brush and thick white paint. Finally, when they are dry, dirty them up a little to make them look real.

If your station appears too high off the ground in relation to a parking lot on the table top, you must cut a pieceof wallboard the size of the area, tack in place, and do your paving job on it. Then you can make a sort of irregular itch around it, as most parking lots have, using some of the plastic materials to be described shortly.

If you have a road leading up to the parking lot—and who ever heard of a station without some way to get there? —you will probably want to make it on wallboard, too, as most roads are raised and have ditches beside them. If your station is in a town, then the road will be a street, without ditches. Instead, it will have curbstones and side-walks on either side. Make these of wallboard. There are many ways to make the road or street, depending on what the location is and what you want. A dirt or gravel road is covered with any of the things mentioned above that look like dirt and gravel, after which it is rutted and dirtied here and there. A blacktop road can be made like the blacktop parking lot. The beaverboard in natural color may serve as a cement road, but dirty it and perhaps paint a faded black line down the middle.

A road may have fences running alongside it, and the parking lot is likely to have fences around it, or around three sides. A neat, strong fence is simulated with short pieces of thin dowel for posts, with wire—not shiny—strung between. The posts can be stuck in the plaster or similar material at the edge of road or parking lot while it is still soft. If one is a little askew it will look even better. You can make other types of fences from small scraps of thin wood, such as that used for cigar boxes, cheese boxes, strawberry baskets. Or you can buy balsa and other small woods, easy to work, at a hobby shop.

Does the road cross the railroad tracks on the way to the station? If so, it probably goes up a slight incline on either side—easily done with a piece of cardboard glued to your wallboard road or table top before the road surface is supplied. The space between the rails will then have to be filled in for cars to cross on. You can do this with a thin strip of wood or cardboard on wood strips, glued to the ties beneath with airplane dope for quick drying, or any glue that holds well on metal. Make sure there is enough space between this little platform and the rails, so the flanges of wheels will not be obstructed.

With a crossing, you need a warning signal. You can make a standard railroad crossing sign yourself, out of small pieces of wood, and letter the right words on it, preferably faded. Or you can buy a flashing signal with lights and/or warning bell, or even a crossing gate, and actuate it automatically with a track trip.

Does the station begin to look a little better? Try parking some cars in the parking lot—not all new and shiny—and putting a few things on the station platform. You can make a baggage truck, for instance, but at the beginning you may prefer to buy it at your train store. Just specify that you want it in scale for S gauge. If you make it yourself, remember that everything in S gauge is 3/16" to the foot. If a real baggage truck is 16 feet long, yours will be 3 inches long. Add to the platform a person or two waiting for a train, a couple of crates if the station handles freight.
 
A little way from the station, beside the tracks, pile up some ties. And if you want more ideas, look at the next few stations you see comparable with yours. There are telephone and telegraph poles, billboards, lampposts with lights, signs along the road saying Stop or Slow and dozens of other items you will see at a glance. You can buy some of them, make even more.

Does the station itself now look too shiny and new? Dirty it here and there with plain soot from the stove or fireplace, with asbestos powder, leftover coffee or tea, tobacco juice.

There are likely to be rust streaks below metal fixtures or nails, dirt around door frames and on window ledges, on the platform.

Some railroad stations have small plots of grass and flowers near them, perhaps with a hedge. If the level of ground here is raised the thickness of wallboard, put that in place first, cover with green paint, thick, and scatter on it while still wet some of the prepared imitation grass put out by train manufacturers; or use sawdust dyed green. In your hobby store, you can probably buy thin sheets of ever- green moss, which can be applied with rubber cement.

This moss is apt to look a little long for a well-trimmed lawn, but it is fine for a green field of rye or other taller grass. Fig. 88 shows many of the features mentioned here, plus suggestions for making crates, barrels, lampposts, etc. If the green grass looks too uniformly green, even for a well-tended plot, place a little batch of dried coffee grounds here and there, representing bare earth. For hedges and shrubs you can use sponge, either real or plastic, dyed green (Fig. 89). For shrubs tear the sponge apart with your fingers to give it the proper rough appearance. The hedge, if a well-trimmed one, can be cut with scissors or sharp knife. Fix in place with almost any glue or with rub ber cement. Shrubs can also be made of Norwegian lichen moss, which has become increasingly popular among model railroaders. It comes already treated and colored in various shades. Just tear off a piece the right size for your shrub. If it is summer and the shrub is flowering, tiny bits of colored paper touched with glue and spotted here and there on the shrub will be pleasant flowers. Don't overdo it, either as to the number of flowers on a shrub or the number of shrubs in any one place.

You can make excellent trees from lichen moss, too, as shown in Fig. 89. Use an ordinary twig for trunk and branches, or the kind of wires that florists use, bent as branches might bend. Glue pieces of lichen moss to them and you have a tree. Instead of lichen moss, green-dyed sawdust will make foliage. Dip the branches in an adhesive, then swish around in the loose sawdust. And remember that no tree is perfectly symmetrical. Sumac flow- ers have been used by many model railroaders to make lifelike trees. If you don't want to make your own, you can buy all kinds of trees at hobby stores.

Some trees and shrubs from stores come with small bases so they can just be set on the table. While this may be a good idea for a portable layout, it is probably not necessary because almost any movable table will take items as tall as your trees. The best procedure is to fix them in place where you want them.

This is done by inserting the trunks in the plaster mentioned before as holding fenceposts along the road and enclosing the parking lot. You may have associated plaster only with mountain building, but some kind of pliable material is useful on many areas. Almost no land that you will see anywhere is truly flat. It rises and falls, sometimes gently, sometimes abruptly, and your pike will not look realistic unless your ground does the same. Since it is not at all difficult to do this, you should plan to make this important improvement. As with the rest of your scenery, take one small section at a time and the job will not occupy too many hours to be stolen from running trains. There are many different materials you can use. For many years, plaster of Paris was the standard as it is easy to mix with water, easy to apply, and easily sculptured   into different shapes. But it weighs a good deal—a serious problem in building a big mountain—and chips easily when dry. Papier-mache is lighter and has plenty of strength for all your purposes; it can be made in different ways. The simplest is to take newspapers, tear them into small pieces about 2" x 2", soak them in water for a day, and add flour to make a paste. It may be simpler to add your paper pieces to a thick wall sizing and let them soak until you have a thick mass. If you are making an earth base, add dark-brown coloring at mixing time and you will save a good deal of paint and brushwork later. When properly soaked and mixed, you have a substance about as thick as plaster, but lighter, which you can apply as desired with trowel, knife, or spoon, and sculpture into various shapes. The sizing or paste makes it adhere to whatever you put it on, and it dries to a firm, light material which you can paint as you wish.

Another commonly used material is asbestos powder, which you mix with water to form a thick claylike paste. To avoid flaking and chipping when dry, add a small amount of water-glass solution (sold as sodium silicate in drugstores) to serve as a bond to hold it together. Asbestos paste can be softened again if you dampen it, and it is quite inexpensive.

For such jobs as a slope of earth, shallow ditch, and uneven ground near the parking lot, no framework is needed. Put your plaster or papier-mache in place with a putty knife or other implement and push it into the form you want. Remember that earth is not smooth, but usually rough and uneven. You might add a few rocks or boulders while the plaster is wet. Pebbles make good rounded boulders but do not look like the sharp-edged rocks more often found in nature. Small flakes off a bigger stone will be just right. Pieces of cork, strangely enough, look a good deal like stones, when imbedded in the plaster earth. Fence- posts and treetrunks should be inserted into the plaster, too, while it is not yet hard.

For the edges of your road, follow the same procedure. You may want the land to slope up from the road on one side or both, as if the road passed through a shallow earth cut. Mold the plaster back from the ditch at an angle, keep it rough, and imbed a few stones in the sides. Look at the next such cut you see on the road and you will find that there are little channels in the dirt running from top to bottom, made by the water during a rain. If there's a big rock in the cut, the channels will go around it. Fenceposts, of course, are not within the cut but follow the natural lay of the land. Fig. 90 may give you some ideas along this line.

What about the color of your newly created earth? Paint it. With ordinary plaster, it is a good idea to size it first so it won't soak up all the paint. Use a thin shellac. For painting, use almost any kind of paint you want and in a great variety of colors, but chiefly different shades of greens and browns. Nothing in nature has much uniform color, and you don't want your earth to look man-made, even if it is. Try painting a base color of brown, for instance, if the plaster is not already colored. Then streak on some darker brown, almost black; add some gray for stones and rocks, a bit of reddish brown for other colored rocks, or even some straight dabs of red for broken bricks. If there are weeds growing on the side of the cut or ditch, use your greens— not too bright, for such plants are probably dirty.

When you have finished your first painting job, don't peer down at it too closely to judge it. No one will ever look at it that way. Stand back a couple of feet—after the paint has dried and lost its shine. If it still looks not quite right to you, try giving it a fleeting glance only. That's the most it will ever get, when the trains are running. The chances are that in the midst of so many other more fasci- nating things on your pike, it will blend in fine and do just what it is supposed to do—look like an insignificant stretch of dirt beside a road or parking lot.

There are many places where you will build up a little plaster earth or rock to make your pike more realistic, even though you raise the level of the ground only slightly.

Where the road is elevated (Fig. 91), you can mold it away gradually so the road will not look like a ramp. Where the tracks leave the station you may want a cut on one side, into a small hill. And in general, you will like the idea of gently undulating ground. The automobile highway, for instance, is rarely flat. It goes up or down as the land does, in the main. Only where the hill is high is a cut hewed through it, and then only a partial  ut, so the road rises somewhat but not the full rise of the natural land. Elevate your road in a natural arc by placing graduated sup- ports of wood strips beneath it—the wallboard will bend enough for this—then build your hill, with the small cut down to the road level, around it on both sides. Then cover the hill with whatever you desire—tall green grass, grazing land full of rocks, a few shrubs, some trees, a farmer's field.

If you have a fairly high hill, there's no need to make it of solid plaster. Put a block of wood in the center, or crum- ple up some heavy wrapping paper in the approximate size and shape of the desired hill (Fig. 92).

Cover with plaster and mold as you need or wish. If you use paper, you might tack or glue the outer edges to the board so it will not shift. To cover the crumpled paper, or any other base, try one of the new ceiling paints, thick like plaster; you can pour it on carefully or apply it with an old stiff brush, then work it into the desired contours with a knife or stick, insert small stones, make gulleys, add weeds, before it sets.

If paper doesn't work well, try old window screening. Bend and crumple into shape, tack here and there to the baseboard, and cover with one of the many plasters suggested.

In planning the rolling hills and valleys of your new world, remember that the railroad tracks themselves may rise and dip slightly. Few real railroad tracks are absolutely level, like a table top, just because almost no real earth is like a table top. With slight elevations in the land, railroads can easily ride right over them because no serious grades are involved. Railroads make cuts through hills only if there is no short and easy way around them and if they present too steep a grade to climb over. Even then, the surveyors will probably lay out the real railroad by making a cut of only half the distance you might suppose, then using the earth excavated to create a fill leading up to this cut. Thus a very slight grade is created and the expensive part of railroad building, excavation, is reduced to a minimum. Try the same idea on your own pike. If you have a fairly high hill, too wide to go around, make a cut through it only halfway to your basic track level; then build up a section of fill leading to the cut so that you get a grade that is almost imperceptible. You will have something that looks very much like what you see along a real railroad. There is nothing deadlier on a model pike, from  a scenic point of view, than stretches of plain flatness.

Eliminate as much of it as you can. And where you do not have the railroad itself undulate slightly, at least have the country in between your various tracks present an uneven appearance.

In making cuts for tracks or highway, remember that rock cuts are steep, clay cuts are more gradual, earth cuts still more gradual. If your cuts have steep sides, make them of rock. If you want dirt and gravel on the cuts, they must be sloping, so they won't all wash down into the road with a rain. In any event there must be ditches.

Remember, too, that highways are usually banked on curves—the sharper the curve the steeper the banking— and that curves usually have guard rails and warning signs. When a road or railroad track passes along the bot- tom of a hill, there is usually a culvert beneath road or tracks to carry away water that runs down the hill. If there is a small stream, there must be a bridge or culvert, of course, but you will find many culverts for drainage on real roads even when you see no sign of a tiny brook.

The highways on your layout don't need to be made of the same material. A wide highway may be made of cement, a branching road of blacktop, a rural road off that of  acadam, and a driveway up to a farmhouse of rutted dirt. The more variety you have, so long as it is lifelike and looks natural, the greater the sense of a wide territory covered by your pike—and that is an illusion you want to cre- ate since the layout must of necessity be far out of scale with a real railroad in real country.

Small details such as have just been mentioned are what make the scenery of a model railroad real. Only a few have been mentioned here, but one more will be added for the man who has followed our suggestion to create scenery in just one small section of his layout. You have a road that ends nowhere—at the place where ordinary wood of your table top begins. Put up a barrier here, with a sign saying:

STOP! DANGER! Road Under Construction.

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