Portland cement scenery
ROBERT HOGAN: SCOTIA BLUFFS, CA; JUNE 1961
The piers and trestle bents, replicating the ones seen on the prototype (above), are made of ³/₈″ poplar covered with a mixture of Portland cement and white glue (right). The first pier with white wash and weather- ing is the second from the left. All of the piers have been hot-glued to the foam base (below right) with some of the short ones supporting the wood trestle bents. The cardboard lattice and paper base for the scenery is almost complete.
what will generate the interest and en- thusiasm to move construction forward on a model railroad. Many, perhaps most of us, are influ- enced (some would say driven) by the railroads we grew up with in our choice of prototype for our layouts. I am no ex- ception. I spent my summers within earshot of the Northwestern Pacific Railroad, a subsidiary of the Southern Pacific, and every model railroad I have built has been patterned after the NWP. If you are going to model the northern end of the NWP, you almost have to mod- el the Scotia Bluffs. The railroad runs for several miles at the base of massive cliffs at the edge of the Eel River, and much of the trackage is on trestles. Ryan and I included a section of the mainline along the Bluffs in our plan for our NWP. We built the roadbed using hardboard spline through the Bluffs area (see the December, 2011, RMC). When the time came to start construc- tion of the trestles and scenery, we cut 42″ out of the roadbed. We knew that building this trestle would be daunting! I have slides of the Bluffs I took on a high school graduation trip in June, 1961. (Yes, I am that old!) We actually model the mid-1950’s but decided to use the slides from 1961 as our guide. We determined the spacing of the tres- tle bents and piers and calculated the number of piers and bents we would need: three concrete bulkheads, 27 con- crete piers and 29 trestle bents. The trestle bents represented no real prob- lem, just time. The concrete piers and bulkheads were another matter. Casting was considered and rejected.
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The piers needed to be about ³/₈″ thick, which left little material for strength if cast in plaster. We decided to try cut- ting the piers from clear wood. The lumber yard suggested clear poplar, which they planed down to ³/₈″ for us. We cut the board down to the correct width, cut it into the needed lengths, then painted the blocks with Aged Con- crete. We ended up with 29 pieces that looked like painted wood!
I headed to the home improvement store looking for something to make our wood blocks look like concrete piers. They had a broken sack of Port- land cement on sale for $3.00. Why not try using cement to look like cement (okay,
technically, concrete)? could I lose for $3.00?
Into the basement I went with 60 pounds of Portland cement. I knew that adding something similar to white
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