In the lead photo (left) the Lehigh Valley Baldwin is delivering a load of steel plate to the Elizabeth Iron Works plant. The basic ground cover is paver sand covered with ground-up leaves, twigs and other organic material from the author’s yard (top). The twigs are on the right. The usual wet methods bonded it in place; the darker areas aboveare peat moss.


did a presentation on scenery. The rea- son for the differences is that each re- gion uses its own quarry to keep ship- ping costs down. For this project I’ll again use paver sand from Home Depot. It’s a mix of light gray colors ranging in size from fine dust to sixteenth-inch pebbles. Us- ing a fine-mesh kitchen strainer I re- moved the larger pieces, leaving a mix of sizes suitable for HO scale ground cover. You might want to review the above mentioned issues of RMC for the techniques used to apply it.


Since we are doing a winter scene with dead leaves and plants, plus large patches of snow, the paver sand is sim- ply a base upon which we can add the desired details. For the most part, fall- en dead leaves and twigs, plus a few patches of snow and debris around the tracks, will be added. I started by emp- tying a grocery bag of dead leaves into


RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN


a kitchen blender and grinding them up, followed by a large quantity of twigs from my yard, thus creating suit- able material for the scene. In the first photo the twigs are on the left and the leaves, to the right.


I also ground up a large amount of peat moss from a nursery. The ground- up peat moss looked for all the world like dead or dormant plants, especially when mixed with the dead leaves. Walt and I quickly covered the “dirt” areas of the diorama with paver sand, wetting it using a spray bottle with “wet” water as we went. Next, I sprin- kled on the ground-up leaves, peat moss and twigs, mostly covering the dirt but leaving some of the base showing as shown in the second photo. When I had everything to my satisfaction I sprayed it again with “wet” water and covered all the areas with diluted white glue. This was allowed to fully dry over a two


day period. The entire diorama was now covered with either dirt mixed with leaves and twigs or concrete, which we discussed last month. Many modelers have tried different methods to simulate snow with vary- ing degrees of success. I recall the stun- ning snow scenes that Rand Hood fea- tured in Model Railroader a few years ago and the snow scene on Mike Con- falone’s layout, also in Model Railroad- er. Those two may have been the best I’ve seen. To achieve that level of suc- cess would be challenging. I checked hobby shops, craft shops, everywhere I could think of, then stum- bled onto just the right thing at an estate sale, marble dust offered by Builders In Scale. Now, I don’t have a clue if it is real- ly marble dust or something else, but af- ter testing it I found that it worked per- fectly, looked very realistic, and gave me exactly what I was after. You can find


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