Lakes, Rivers, Mountains, And Valleys

Almost everyone likes a lake or pond on his layout. It adds variety to the layout, breaks the effect of flatness even if it is flat, lends another color to the whole picture, provides opportunities for little details that are different, and gives a good reason for the curve of a train track.

There are several ways to make a lake. Mirrors used to be recommended, but people soon realized that few lakes or ponds are still enough to reflect everything clearly all the time. Ordinary window glass, or ripple glass which is smooth on one side, wavy on the other, serves much better with a little paint. The paint is best applied to the under surface, shades of blue and blue-green being used, darker in color in the center where water is usually deeper. A few flecks of white look like whitecaps but should not be used unless the lake is large enough. The shape of the glass makes little difference, as you are going to give it a natural, irregular shore line with earth-plaster anyway. Fix the glass to the table with tacks at a few spots around the edge so it won't shift, then build your plaster sloping down to it from all sides (Fig. 93).

You can treat the edges of your lake in any way you wish, depending on the nature of the terrain around it. (Jive it a sandy beach with fine sand, a rocky shore line, or just plain mud, with the hoofmarks of cows that have come down for a drink. You can put a boat on the surface by cutting a toy or model boat in two and gluing it in place with airplane dope. If the bottom half of the boat is gone, it will seem to be in the water. A dock, ducks, trees and bushes along the shore, a boy fishing—put in or around your lake what you have seen in or around lakes like this. But once again, don't overdo and clutter it up.

 

Another way of making a realistic lake is to give it gen- uine depth (Fig. 94). Cut a hole in your table—it isn't necessary if you have an open-top table—and suspend an old washbasin beneath it, tacked or nailed up from the bottom. Or tack a maze of cardboard strips from one side of the hole to the other, underneath, to form a base for plaster. Paint, imbed stones, some moss, a waterlogged tree trunk or anything that fits, then cover the hole with clear or ripple glass, and build up the shore line around it.

 There are other bodies of water to be considered for your layout—rivers and streams of various sizes. You may travel miles without seeing a lake but you can never go far without finding at least a small stream, or a dried-up river bed. Streams serve to break up the flatness of land and they also give you an excuse to build bridges. If your terrain is comparatively flat, rivers will probably meander through it slowly, their banks rising only a short distance above the level of the water. If the world you have made is a little more rugged, streams will move faster, will have cut deeper into the earth, and will be rock-strewn because the force of the stream has carried rocks down from the hills.

Your stream may come down a steep hill or mountain, winding around boulders and outcroppings, dropping in a short waterfall here or there. On many steep hillsides or cuts, in fact, there will be signs of stream beds even when there is no water present, and these dried-up rivulet beds will follow the course that water would take if it flowed down the hill.

The depth of the cut you make for a river will depend upon the kind of river you want. In any event, the best procedure is to make the river bed first and then build up the banks on either side afterward, remembering how uneven they usually are. If you have a broad, slow stream, plain glass will do, painted as the lake was painted. A faster-moving river can still use glass, but you may want to glue some stones and pebbles on top, as if they were sticking above the surface of the water. Strips of crushed Cellophane make a rushing brook winding and twisting among the rocks, and more of the same a waterfall (Fig. 95). You may paint a few streaks of blue in if you wish.

A rocky mountain brook may actually show little water because there are so many rocks. Make your river bed from plaster, sloping the edges naturally, add a profusion of rocks, and then paint a few streaks of blue among the rocks as if a stream were there but exposed itself only occasionally. You might try pouring a tablespoon of shellac or varnish at the top of your riverbed, tilting the table slightly and letting it flow down to the other end. It is bound tofollow among the rocks the natural path that water would take. Color it with blue color first if you want—an oil color for varnish, water-soluble color for shellac.

A very small stream of this sort may pass under the high- way or railroad tracks through a culvert, which can be made easily from the cardboard cylinder in a paper-towel or toilet-paper roll, cut to the right length, as shown in Fig. 96, which also suggests different kinds of bridges and trestles. Remember that roads, either rail or auto, are built up from ground level at a culvert or bridge of any kind. Look at a picture of the sort you want to build, or, better still, look at a real culvert where it goes under a highway or railroad track.

Somewhat larger streams are crossed by bridges that have no superstructure. The smallest of these may be just glorified culverts, with some stonework at the opening on either side. You can draw the marks of simulated stone- work on plaster, imbed real stones in the plaster, or use actual stone building blocks such as those made for small children. But don't let them remain too neat and new- looking.

Every body of water must be crossed by a bridge of suit able nature and size to look right. You don't throw a big trestle bridge over a six-foot river because no railroad would do so. For medium-sized rivers, use a girder bridge. For wide rivers or deep gulleys, use the trestle bridge. If you have a tall mountain with a cliff, you can even go in for a long, high wooden trestle which you make yourself out of small pieces of wood. This, however, is a major task usually undertaken only by the old-timer who hasn't much left to do on his pike. Some of the old-timers will also insist on real water for their lakes and streams, but leaks are frequent and piping difficult. It is better to leave that sort of headache to the builders of commercial layouts used for display purposes.

Bridges can be used when you have two levels of track, and one train passes over another, or where the highway goes beneath the tracks. If the bridges you can buy from the store do not fit your particular purpose, build one yourself out of an Erector set. It is easy, and such bridges look quite realistic.

Bridges can add a great deal to the appearance of your pike, and some layouts cannot be managed without them. But do not place a bridge on the layout just because you like one or received one for Christmas. A bridge must have a reason for being there or it looks all wrong. If a railroad can with little added mileage and no big grades skirt the  edge of a lake, it will do just that instead of trying to bridge it. Follow the same principle yourself.

This basic truth also applies to tunnels. Railroads do not tunnel through small hills. They go over them, skirt them, or make cuts through them. Tunnels are made only in mountains that cannot be climbed or skirted. Mountains with tunnels are among the favorite scenic effects of model railroads, and for many good reasons.

They destroy the flat appearance of a table more effectively than any- thing else. They hide a corner of a room successfully, and corners are always to be hidden if possible. The trouble with a corner is that it so obviously makes the railroad change direction; you want to have your railroad curve only for reasons that exist on the pike itself. Moreover, a corner of a room in plain sight emphasizes the limited space of your pike, while you want to create an illusion of great distance. Get rid of the corner by building a mountain there. Who knows what lies on the other side of it? Perhaps more hills, valleys, lakes, rivers, and mountains, with miles and miles of railroad track.

A mountain is also a place for a train to hide for a while, which is another way of increasing the illusion of distance, or time consumed. Let your track that must curve enter a tunnel in the mountain. But do not let it start its curve before disappearing from view. Instead, give it just one curve in the other direction, so that the train seems to be going off to the other side of the mountain and right out of the room and the house, as seen in Fig. 97. When it appears again, from the other end of the tunnel, it is going in a brand new direction and doesn't seem to be the same train. If you wish, you can stop the train while it is inside the mountain, turn to other operations on your pike, and bring the hidden train out later. It will have traveled fifty or sixty miles, to all intents and purposes, while out of view.

If you have another line of track that must turn the corner, put it on a higher level of land and make it skirt the mountain along a dramatic cut in its side. Your train has turned the corner, as it must because it has reached the end of the room or table, but it doesn't seem to be turning for that reason. It turns because a mountain is in the way, and most trains go around mountains.

The basic purpose of most of your scenery must be the obscuring of the fact that you have a toy railroad on a table, a great deal of railroad track circling and turning around in a very small area. Mountains and tunnels do an excellent job of obscuring, if they are handled right. A cut in a hill will do the same thing, if it enables a train, or even the track, to disappear from view for a short stretch, especially where too many other tracks are near by. A row of store fronts, a factory, a thick clump of trees on a low hillside all accomplish the same purpose. Place such things in strategic spots  that will serve the purpose of creating an illusion (Fig. 98). In general, avoid big buildings or structures, because they do not leave room enough for other things, and great variety has the effect of lengthening and broadening your world on a table.

A mountain, however, is one big structure that is worth while, and of course it is never actually as big as it looks. No model-railroad mountain can be anywhere near in scale because no pike table is big enough or ceiling high enough. All you can do is to make it look as real as possible, rough, rugged, vari-colored. One side may slope rather gently, another drop abruptly in a towering cliff. It may be cut by a deep ravine. It may be rocky and bare or covered with Vegetation. Farms or orchards may climb part way up the gentler sides. A mine shaft may be farther up. You can get many ideas by looking at the pictures of mountains on railroad pikes that you will find in the model-railroad magazines.

How do you build a mountain, no matter what its ultimate shape? There are many ways of doing it, but essen- tially it has a basic framework over which plaster of some kind is laid, sculptured, and painted. In most cases the rough framework is made of pieces of scrap wood. If the mountain is to be permanently fixed, nail the foundation pieces directly to the table. If it must be moved, nail them to a piece of plywood of the correct size and shape.

The pieces of wood should extend up only a short distance at the outside, getting higher and higher as you reach the peak of the mountain. Heights are irregular, of course, and a precipice will have one long piece extend ing far up. The total height may be a foot and a half or three feet, depending upon your space. In general, however, a very tall mountain on a small ground area looks too artificial. And you don't really need that great height to achieve your desired effects.

If you are going to carry a line of track in a cut along the side of the mountain, you must plan for that level space when you build your wooden framework. A train-board of the proper width should be nailed to the up-ward-reaching boards much as it is nailed to the crosspiece grids of an open-top table. If a tunnel goes through the mountain, its entrances must also be planned from the outset. Lay out the track as it will eventually be on the table or board, mark off its path—at least 31/2 inches wide and build around it. Boards that will not show form the rough portals. Make certain that foundation boards and braces do not get in the way of the train's ultimate path. There must be a clearance above the track of at least 41/2 inches, and more is preferable.

After the wooden framework is built, cover it with wire screening (Fig. 99). Bend, fold, and crumple the screen first so it will not be smooth and flat, then lay roughly over the board foundations and nail in place. You can punch and pull it into the approximate shape you are looking for at this time. Don't nail screen over tunnel opening or across the level area for surface tracks.

For the next step in mountain building, cover the screen with one of the many plaster substances mentioned in the preceding  chapter. Or dip strips of burlap in thickly starched water and lay them over the screen. Strips of paper dipped in sizing can be handled the same way. Burlap or paper becomes stiff and firm when dry, strong enough to take a thin coat of plaster that can be brushed on. When this is dry, thick blobs of plaster may be added to form outcroppings, ravines, humps, a pile of debris at the bottom of a slide. Do your sculpturing and plant all trees, poles, fences, while the plaster is still pliable.

In painting the mountain, use many different colors. Nature does. The base of it may be predominantly brown, but it will be a dozen shades of brown, with some black, yellow, and reddish tints. Keep all colors soft and let one melt into the next. Around the bottom slopes there may well be a good deal of green, too, for grazing areas or fields where slopes are not too steep. As you near the top of the mountain, work in some blues and violets. There may be no actual blue or violet color on a real mountaintop, but when viewed from a distance mountains often look hazy blue or purple. And your aim is to create the illusion of distance.

Tunnel portals (Fig. 100) may be sculptured into the plaster so as to look like stone, painted gray, and streaked with black at the top where steam engines would have deposited their soot. You can make wooden portals, or use stone building blocks. Study some pictures of actual tun- nel portals to see how they are shaped and constructed.

And remember that they usually come at the end of a long cut, so the terrain slopes up steeply on either side of the track near the entrance to the tunnel.

If your layout is up against a wall and can be considered more or less permanent, a mountain may be built with considerably less trouble, as no wooden framework is needed (Fig- 101). Cut long strips of heavy cardboard of the sort used for posters, each strip about an inch wide and long enough to extend from the wall down to the table top, with undulations in between. Tack or nail the strips to the wall, after adding a touch of glue under the end, and lead them down to the table, bending and buckling them a bit for unevenness on the way. Glue and tack the other ends to the table some distance away from the wall. (If you have train tracks running through this mountain, construct the trainboard and lay your track first, then build over it.) When the cardboard strips are in place, overlay them with paper or burlap soaked in starchy water or sizing. Let dry, add a thin coat of plaster, blob on more plaster, and sculpture, paint, add trees, etc. Despite the light materials, this mountain will be strong and firm.

A mountain attached to the wall brings up the thought of that wall behind your layout. No matter how realistic you make your pike, the sight of the wall, which is very obviously nothing but the wall of a room, tends to destroy the illusion. The mountain covers part of it, but you can- not have high mountains all along the back and sides of your layout. The answer to the problem is scenic backgrounds especially made for model railroads. They are incolor, in scale, in proper perspective to create the illusion of distance. They come in a variety of subjects—mountain scenes, farm scenes, town scenes, industrial scenes—each picture being about three feet long and a foot and a half high. In some cases the different scenes are made so that you can put them side by side and form a continuous pan- orama—town leading into farmland, which leads into mountainous country.

If you have a corner unoccupied by a mountain, curve one scene around the corner so that the right angle disappears and its distressing limiting power on the imagination is destroyed. And try to keep the background pictures a few inches behind any structures on your layout. That little space seems to increase the illusion of distance. If structures are right up against the background pictures, they are too obviously model pieces in front of a picture. The idea is to make pike and background blend.

If you haven't definite ideas about how to handle your terrain, you might buy some attractive background pictures first, then scenic your layout to match. If you are something of an artist, you will enjoy painting your own background scenes, and they will be like no one else's. You can be much less artistic and still make many of your own buildings, as suggested in Fig. 102. You can buy them, if you want, in a wide variety—houses, barns, churches, schools, garages, filling stations, railroad repair shops, stores, diners, factories. Aside from the finished articles, you can purchase kits with prefabricated parts of buildings which you assemble yourself. Try making some small buildings and learn how simple it is. Cardboard boxes of approximately the right size require very little work to turn them into flat-topped stores or garages—holes for windows covered with cellophane from the inside, other holes for doors. You can paint the brickwork or other siding with water colors or buy at the hobby store paper printed in a variety of forms—brick, stone, clapboard— which you glue to the sides of the building. You can also buy roofing paper in the form of shingles, or make shingles yourself by cutting long strips of paper and notching with scissors. Even spaghetti has its uses, as Fig. 102 shows. Every building has signs on it, of course.

You can letter your own signs, cut the letters from magazines and glue them in place in the right order, or you can get decals of all letters in a variety of sizes at the hobby store. Fig. 103 shows a homemade billboard and a "whistling" billboard sold by model train stores.

 

 

In making buildings, signs, billboards—cut from ads in magazines—come as close to proper scale size as you can. Remember that everything in S gauge is 3/16" to the foot.
If a house is thirty feet wide, your scale reproduction of it will be 55/8" wide. You don't need to take out a ruler to measure a house or building you are copying—just pace it off or estimate it and you will come close enough. It is a good idea, in making your own buildings, to copy those you see around you. If you look carefully and train your powers of observation, you will see that every building, house, store, or factory has far more little details on it than most people put on their models—window shutters, mail-boxes, house numbers, door knockers, porch lights. And there is usually something sitting in the back yard—trashburner, garbage can, bicycle, barrel, cordwood. You can make models of many of these things with bits of wire, paper clips, scraps of wood, dowels, matchsticks, thread, as shown in Fig. 104.

A house, for instance, becomes twice as real when you attach a paper-clip TV antenna to the roof and run a white-thread clothesline from the back porch to a pole—with a couple of sheets hanging on it.

One obvious place for buildings is near your remote- control loading devices—a paper mill next to the log loader, a coal yard beside the coal loader, some oil derricks not far from oil storage tanks, and so on. The load- ers, fascinating as they are, look a little silly sitting on your pike unconnected with anything; they must be placed where they are for a reason that is apparent.
Even if a visitor looking at your pike does not take in all these details, they will have a cumulative effect; he will know that the pike looks right although he may not notice the little things that make it right.

The best way to be sure of your details is to observe reality and copy it whenever you can. When you walk down the street look closely at stores, houses, factories, stations, and note their small details. Make a mental list of the items along the street itself—fire hydrants, mailboxes, lampposts, telephone poles, a wrecker towing a car with two dogs barking at it, kids on bicycles, women talking, a traffic policeman in the middle of an intersection, parking and (chiefly) no-parking signs, parking meters, busses, subway entrances. The list can be almost endless. Some of the details are too small for you to copy, others too difficult, but most of them you can add to your streets and houses for realism.

On your next drive in the country note the farmhouses and barns, the fields, the way the earth lies, fences, lumber yards (an easy industry to make), roadside stands. And don't pass by the dump without giving it a second thought. Nothing could be better for that hollow place beside your country road. Toy cars that are broken, wheels that have come off, almost any broken thing with a reasonable scale size, can go in that dump—and you can make things for it specifically, or use the models you attempt to make that don't turn out right for their intended use.

Your next trip on a railroad will, in the same way, give you a dozen ideas for things to put alongside your track. Looking at reality if you want to copy it is the one sure way of making your scenery convincing. It is also a sure way of increasing your enjoyment of this aspect of building a model railroad—actually the most creative part of the whole business, for it allows you to express yourself as no other task connected with the hobby does.

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