Adding Depth and Dimension with Model Railroad Accessories

So, this portion of the layout is now looking pretty good. We've broken up some of that horizontal space by adding hills, by adding some greenery, putting some buildings in, we have some roads that we broke up the space with and a background. What else can we do to de-emphasize this horizontal space, this long flat horizontal space? Well, we can add some verticals. And by verticals, I mean, elements that have a very strong up and down element that will really help de-emphasize how long and flat this area is. And we're gonna start at the back of the layout and work our way forward. And one of the things we're gonna do to break up some of this long expanse of trees that we have back here is by adding some background buildings. Now, I've got a couple of background buildings here. The ones that I happen to be using are by a company named Downtown Deco. They are designed to be exclusively background buildings. There's no rest of the building. And we can just pop those back here like so. And you can see already that adding those nice, strong vertical lines of these buildings really starts to draw your eye away from some of this horizontal space. Background buildings make a lot of sense in this portion of the layout, because we've got some industrial areas here in the foreground. So, it would make sense for the town to have some other industries that are not necessarily served by the rail. But would also be in this portion of the town. So, there's something we can do right away that breaks up some of this horizontal line. But we've still got a lot of backdrop over here that could use some help. Because again, it's kind of flat. And again, that's not so bad because we don't wanna draw attention to the backdrop. We want to keep our focus on the layout in front. But there's something else that we can do to the backdrop that will give it a little bit of dimension and give it a little bit more vertical lines. What we can do to the backdrop is actually make it three dimensional. And let me show you what it is we're gonna do first. And then I'll explain how it's done. I've got a piece of backdrop here that has three dimensions to it. It's got what's called puff ball trees on it. And when we add this to the backdrop, like so, you can see right away that it adds a lot of nice dimension to the backdrop. It breaks up that flat area of the backdrop that is basically, had nothing going on but a bunch of trees and add some visual interest to it. Now, let's talk about how that was done. What I did was took a piece of black cardboard and just cut it in a random curve like this. Then I made again, what's called puff ball trees. So, if you're not familiar with that term, puff ball trees are made with a material that's called poly fiber fill. A poly fiber fill comes in just a variety of colors. And it's made specifically for quilting and other fabric type of applications as batting inside, or to give it some dimension. In our case though, companies like Woodland Scenics, Micro-Mark and others will make this poly fiber fill in color so that as we create trees out of it, white, normally white poly fiber fill won't show through. And what we do with this poly fiber fill is basically pull off a little section of it. Well, we'll tease it a little bit. And then we'll give it a good shot of hairspray. And then probably put it in a paper bag that's filled with, again, our course turf, our course ground foam. Shake it around a lot in there. And what you'll get is a puff ball tree that looks something like this. Again, you can tease it. You can make it as large or small as you want. Once that hairspray is dried. And then what I did with the backdrop with that piece of black cardboard is just gave it a nice shot of spray adhesive and just stuck the puff ball trees to it, like so. Now underneath here, what I did was I printed out another copy of my backdrop and just cut out the bottom portion of it and stuck it underneath the puff ball trees. Just so that there's something to look at in those voids. Now, of course, the trees look a little bit funny right now because they don't have any stems. So what I did was I went out to the garden, I cut myself a bunch of twigs. And then cut those off with some wire cutters. And we'll just simply plug those in, if you will, underneath the trees. We don't even have to glue them. So by adding these what look like trunks, and, you know, you don't wanna get too, you wanna be as random as you can with these things. So, I've got some small ones. I've got some larger ones. We can put some in front of others, like so. And just start making it look for all the world like a forest back there. Oops. It's not even bad to have some lying down. I've got some large tweezers here that kind of help position some of these. And the poly fiber filled trees, the puff ball trees will help hold these stems, these trunks up. You know, you can glue them down if you want. I need to get that one in an area that's a little bit, has a little bit shorter trees. You can glue them down if you want. You don't need to glue them down. And again, don't get so concerned with making sure that there's a trunk for every one of the puff balls. You're trying to simulate what looks like a forest. So, any trees that are in the background would probably be a little bit smaller. And you can see how that would go. We'll do that all the way along the backdrop for as long as the backdrop lasts. And making sure that the poly fiber filled trees, the puff ball trees don't stick out so far that a boxcar or an engine or some other piece of rolling stock catches those. But puff ball trees are a great way of adding some dimension to the backdrop. The trunks that you're adding add more of those vertical lines. And it gives the whole backdrop a little bit more interest and really makes the layout start looking like it goes on beyond the wall. So now we're gonna move away from the wall and do some more vertical elements in the main part of the layout. As you'll see, there are several things that we can add that really help add some more verticality, if you will, to this portion of the layout. And the first two we're gonna add are pretty dramatic. The first one is a water tower. This is a water tower by Korber. And we're gonna put it back here next to the parking lot of this factory. I had to drill a hole into the hillside to accommodate one of the legs. But you can see right away that adds a lot of nice dimension to this space. The second element we're going to add is a chimney to the factory. So a chimney this size on a factory this size would make a lot of sense. And I've pre-glued the bottom of it a little bit with some sticky glue. And we're just gonna set that back here for the time being. We can come along later on. And really permanently attach that. But as you can see this whole area now suddenly looks a lot deeper because of these strong vertical lines. There's one other element that we can add to this whole area that would be very, very typical for an industrial area like this. And that is power poles. We're gonna be adding some telephone poles, power poles to this area. And that will add a lot of nice small vertical elements throughout this whole area. And to do that, we're just simply gonna drill a hole here in the hillside, the sculpted mold hillside that we made. It doesn't have to be very deep. And then, I'm going to use something called Formula 560 Canopy Glue. This is a glue that the airplane guys use to hold the canopies on their airplanes. And the reason that I like it is because it has a very, very fast drying time. And it dries perfectly clear. So we'll just squirt a little bit of that into the hole. And then we'll insert our power pole here. And we're gonna space these out by I typically in the real world, power poles are spaced out about 300 feet apart in rural areas, 100 feet apart in urban areas. But in our case, we're just going to put them where they would be logically correct. So, I'll drill another hole over here. We're gonna run the power poles between the tracks down here by our industrial complex. And so, I'll just drill a hole here between the tracks. Put a little bit of our canopy glue in there. And then put a power pole in. And in this case, I'm gonna use a power pole that has some transformers on it. I've already pre-drilled some holes elsewhere in the layout. I've got one back here by this factory that we can set next to that. And we've got one more that will be over here on the hillside. And again, you can see these are spaced out roughly 15 inches apart, which would probably be an about 100 scale feet. So, power poles, telephone poles, yet another way of adding some nice vertical elements to the space. And you can see that the whole horizontal space is really starting to get broken up very nicely.