How to Build Model Railroad Scenery with Beadboard Foam

A few tears ago, I was introduced to the use of styrofoam and the basic tools necessary to work with this material, which are a SubTerrain Foam Knife, a couple rasps, a putty knife, and they have a material called Foam Putty, which can be used fill irregularities in the styrofoam once you've cut it. Unlike the industrial foams, which give off toxic fumes, the foam that's available from Woodland Scenics is workable in a closed environment with a hot wire cutter. The first step in cutting the foam would be to mark where you want to have your cut. The next step, I will use a hot wire. You just turn the hot wire on, and pass it through the foam slowly. You want to work very slowly, and just pull it through the foam. And we just remove the excess foam, take our next piece of foam, place it approximately where you want it to end up, and in this case, going to just make a small modular section. I will mark the backside of the upper piece of foam with my foam pencil. And this time I will cut the foam with the foam knife. Slice through the foam. You don't have to cut all the way through, just enough that you can snap it. Place it on the edge of the table and snap in half. And we place the second piece of foam on top of our first piece of foam, and again, we just make a mark with our foam knife, and using our hot wire, cut through it. And just cut through and remove your excess. Now we place the second layer of foam onto the first, and we'll use what we had just cut off of the second layer before with our foam knife, will become the top of the hillside. And again, we just mark it with a foam pencil, and using the hot wire, just cut that last piece of material. Don't worry about it being too crooked or not cutting straight, because we can take care of any irregularities that we want to take care of later on. Once everything's cut, you want to glue it together. And Woodland Scenics has come to the rescue once again with some hot glue. This is compatible with the foam material. Just simply flip over each segment that you want to glue, apply some glue to the section. Set your gun aside, flip over the foam. As it cools, it will set up, and your foam sections will be together. Put some more glue on the third section of styrofoam. And place that into position. Now, if you're not happy with the undulations in the ground, you want to straighten something out a little bit, create a indentation somewhere, or just finely work the material, that's what we have our sheer forms for. And I have found that with sheer forms, they do create a bit of a mess, and it's a good idea to have a vacuum cleaner handy with you so you can suck up the material as you're rasping, till you're happy with your surface.