brown cast, so some of the brown paint we use for dirt was mixed into the ce- ment to achieve that color. The bases of the bluffs have a large amount of talus piled up around the piers and bents, and once all the piers and bents were in place, we had to de- cide how to build up the slopes without using pounds and pounds of rock. After trying many options, we cut rosin pa- per and shaped it to fit around and be- tween the bents and piers and up to the base of the cliff. We used hot glue to attach the paper. We couldn’t fit the paper tightly against the piers and bents, so we used a minimally-expanding acrylic spray caulk from an aerosol can to seal the edges and close the gaps. It was from DAP®
and could be worked with a wet
finger or knife. We used wet artist pal- let knives to work the caulk into cor- ners and other openings.
The angled slope and upper slide have a coating of cement that isn’t quite dry. The drying time depends upon how much paint is in the mix. Note that the wet cement has lumps inten- tionally left in the mix to increase the roughness of the surface. The tissue paper wrinkles still show through at this stage. To protect the rails, the rosin paper is placed over them.
The cement plus the white glue plus the paint gave us the look we were striv- ing for. The fact that we never measured
the amount of paint per batch gave nat- ural-looking color variations, too. Sever- al areas of the bluffs have a distinct
There is a limestone quarry near us that has many different sizes of lime- stone for sale, and a trip there revealed that they would sell us any size for $8.00 a ton. When I said all I needed was a few buckets of their finest grade, they gave me a hard hat, pointed to a pile and said, “Help yourself!” Back in the basement we used a
All of the excess cement and paint (above left) has been scraped away and the wall restained. The beginnings of the final rock coating have been applied. Full strength white glue is spread between the pilings (above right) and down the slide face. A ¹₄″ brush is good for this work. Finely crushed limestone (left) is then blown out of an in- dex card onto the glue, which captures the fine rock to leave a loose, rocky surface.
kitchen strainer, (my wife has never missed it), and a fine screen to sepa- rate the limestone into several even finer grades.
After everything was dry, we coated the paper and caulk with diluted white glue and carefully poured the un- screened limestone onto the slopes at
RAILROAD MODEL CRAFTSMAN 73
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