Hi everyone, I'm new to this website. My name is Egon and I'm from the Netherlands. A few weeks ago I decided to buy myself a model train set. I wasn't sure what all I was getting myself into, but so far it has been fun. After I bought the set I started looking up information about landscaping. I've made a start and I have no idea where I'm going with it yet. It's been fun so far and when researching about landscaping I found this site. I got a photo album online with all the photo's of my progress so far, tips are welcome: http://picasaweb.google.com/egonheidendal/20060907Modeltrain
Welcome Egon. It looks like you work with styropor. A good idea. Here you see what I did. It's in German but the pictures will tell you. I worked with Woodland. Wolfgang
Thank you for welcoming me guys. Wolfgang, I like what you did, it has a lot of detail. The german is no problem, I also speak german. I worked a little bit more tonight. It's all added to the same album, but it's the pictures after the label session 3. http://picasaweb.google.com/egonheidendal/20060907Modeltrain/
The brand is märklin. It's a german brand. It's one of their digital starter sets. The train itself is from the german railways (DB).
Welcome aboard. If I may make a suggestion. When you get ready to make a more permanent layout you might want to make a model of your model. By doing this you build up skills you can use later and also you get to see where everything will go and if it will fit even. Such as buildings [which more of us neglect to plan for then we want to admit LOL]. Anyhow pop over to my site for ideas if you wish. It is all free so enjoy. And once again welcome and have fun.
fsm1000, I thought about doing that before I started, and I probably will next time. I want to make everything on the fly for this first one though, because that I learn the most, even from my mistakes. It might turn out to be a bad idea, but atleast I had fun doing it. I'm planning on adding a little bit more gravel around the entire outline of the track either today or tomorrow. My tunnel is also finally glued together and drying. After that I'm going to shape it more into a real mountain. Anybody got any tips what to use best on styrofoam? small saw?
Try a bread knife for cutting the styrofoam, or a hacksaw blade with small teeth and some insulation tape wrapped round one end for a rudimentary handle. Nice progress. Jon
Jon is right. I have found that a serrated bread knife seems to be about the best thing for cutting foam. I have one with a thin blade and another with a heavy blade. Both have thier uses.
Hi Egon! I'm a bit late, but welcome to trainboard, from a fellow foreigner. Enjoy your stay with the guys. Cheers from the chatterbox from over the waters!
Thanks for the tips and comments guys. I'm going to try it with a breadknife. I'll let you know how it goes and when new pictures are avaible.
Try applying paste wax to both sides of your knife blade, then buff it with a soft cloth while the blade is laying flat on a table. (It is less likely to cut you that way. Just work carefully.) The wax helps the blade slide through the foam cleanly. If you use a saw, keep a vacuum sweeper hose running next to the saw blade to gather up the fine foam dust, or you will have it all over everything! Do this if you use a wood rasp or sand paper too! Remember, hot wire forming is highly toxic, so not a good idea. If you simply tear off pieces of extruded insulation foam, it has the tendency to look like rocks. This is also true of soft spongy foam, which when glued to hardshell, will bend around curved surfaces. You can cover the open pores of construction foam, by spritzing a light coating of (30% glue/70% water 6 drops of detergent), white glue on the foam, then gently lay pieces of Kleenex tissues, or ordinary toilet paper, on the surface, spritz it again with water only, (no glue), but only enough to lightly wet the paper, and allow to dry. You can always add more layers to places if needed. If a straight edge of the paper happens to show up somewhere, tear a strip on both sides, and lay over the straight edge to hide it. The torn edge of paper disappears because it is a 'feathered edge", see? The paper surface tends to look more real when painted earth tones, or when sprinkled with real dirt, especially if the foam has open cells. The paper also does pretty well to re-surface the "beaded" type closed cell hard foams too.
Egon, This is the only photo I have of the 'toilet paper' scenery. My new layout is not up to the scenery point yet. We used copper screen wire to form the mountains, then covered them with burlap sack material and painted it brown. It wasn't so hot looking. My Dad came up with the 'toilet paper' idea and we tried it. It worked well. Some places we had to add a second or third layer before painting it. We used thinned glue and a 3" wide paint brush to apply glue to the burlap, then just unrolled a strip of toilet paper on the wet glue, and painted another strip along side the first, over-lapping about an inch or so. The new layer would soak up enough 'wetness' to lay down flat on the previous layer really well, until the painted glue began to get 'tacky'. By then we had already gone around the first mountain and had arrived at the point of beginning. We even made some 'wet'd paper-wads' and just 'smooshed' them on here and there to represent rocks and boulders. Those looked better than the rest, so we painted again in places, and dribbled dirt, small pebbles and sand around. That really looked good because it rolled down just like an avalanche with the rip-rap ending up at the bottom prototypically! The earth tones were great, after all they were real! There was no glossy look, because we did not paint over the dirt. You may note the road going through hair-pin turns up to the Royal Gorge swinging bridge across the gorge and a steam Hudson coming along the river below. See the car going up the road? You could still buy real sponge from the ocean, which we pulled apart in the shape of trees, dipped in green ink, stuck a brown tooth pic in the bottom and stuck trees around over the mountains. Yes it was three rail, the engine is "The" Lionel Scale Hudson 1939 and the tunnel portals were the Moffet portals, (To us kids) anyway. He was a GREAT Dad and I still miss him! In later years I did the same method using foams, but no photos were taken back then. The peaks of the Grand Tetons Mountains in the back ground have snow on them, made by crushing old light bulbs into a gritty powder, then sprinkled onto wet white gloss enamel paint. This made the snow sparkle as the viewer moved around the layout. As many as five kids from the neighborhood would bring their trains to run on my layout, and we would all have something to do. It was great fun, even though today the 'rivet counters' would scream, "Not Prototype", and Haz-Mat and insurance would feint! When we are having fun, who cares?
Thanks for the extensive explanation! It helped a lot. I have another question though. I want to paint the roads but i have no idea how wide a HO scale road would be? inches or centimeter both works
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