Creating a landslide Hiding where the sky meets the plaster landscape/Tom Troughton
pings of one, as well. With these photos as guides, I started the modeling. I planned to use both short and tall pine trees in the scene, so I asked the mem- bers of our modeling group to help make some. Over the years I have probably made several hundred twist- ed wire (bottle brush) trees using floral wire, jute or hemp rope with a portable hand drill and vise. The process usual- ly worked, but it was messy and had shortcomings. This time we used a tree
PHOTOS BY THE AUTHOR W
hen I started building my Sn3 Cimarron & Tall Timbers Railroad over a decade ago I
had one area that I wanted to model as an avalanche or landslide scene. Years passed, and it came time to finish that section of the railroad. The Hydrocal® hard shell scenery base and dental plaster molds were put in place and colored with washes of acrylic craft paints. The area looked good, but I was
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN
concerned about how to hide the dark seam formed where the castings butted up against the sky-blue painted wall. I hoped that carefully placed pieces of sphagnum moss, ground foam and bot- tle brush trees would do the trick. With that decision made it was finally time to do the landslide itself. Browsing the internet, I found sever- al photos of such slides, and a friend in Colorado sent some newspaper clip-
A landslide zone was used to hide the joint where the three-dimensional scenery met the flat blue sky and to draw attention from it. It is behind D&RGW 495; tracing out the shape of the rocks along the left side of the photo reveals the casting’s shape. Sphagnum moss, ground foam and bottle brush trees help to carry out the disguise.
making “machine” produced by the McKenzie Brothers Timber Company. They have an informative website which shows this useful tool: see
www.mckenziebrotherstimberco.com/. I needed trees that were about 10 to
12 inches tall for use directly against the side wall, and smaller ones, about four or five inches tall, to go in front of them. I’m not going to go into the nuts and bolts of actually constructing the
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