How to Make a Model Railroad Road Disappear
MRA EditorsDescription
One of the greatest tools of the model railroader is forced perspective. The illusions you can create with proper scaling and the right angles are seemingly endless, and these illusions can often be essential for a realistic model depending on the scene and space constraints with which you are working.
An important illusion that expert modelers use regularly for both urban and rural scenes is the disappearing model railroad road. The road doesn’t really disappear, of course, but rather leads into the backdrop and fades to a point on the horizon. This technique offers a number of unique benefits to your scene, particularly taking the problem of space constraints and making it a non-issue. Because we think this little trick is so handy, in today’s lesson we’ll teach you a bit about the methods necessary for making a perpendicular model railroad road disappear into the backdrop to give your scene depth and authenticity.
Disappearing the model railroad road
To help you learn the proper technique for making a perpendicular model railroad road disappear into the backdrop, expert modeler Tom Lund gives you an inside look at one of his recent scenes. In this model, Tom leads a model railroad road from the city out toward a hillside in the country, where the tarmac vanishes from view. To do this, he demonstrates the concept of forced perspective and scaling in regards to foreground and background objects.
As part of his explanation, Tom uses telephone poles and a perpendicular model railroad road to show how you can utilize in-scene figurines and a painted backdrop to achieve the illusion of a disappearing model railroad road that continues off into the sunset. To close out the lesson, he talks about a couple ways you can use forced perspective on your model railroad road to create a similar effect in a downtown city scene.
It's common on model railroads for roads to go perpendicular to the backdrop and leave the backdrop. How do we hide that? On this diorama, the road goes over the crest of a hill and actually disappears. You don't see the edge of the road from the front of the layout. This is especially effective on layouts that are close to viewing level. Then as it goes into the backdrop, as I painted, you can see I forced perspective by making the road narrower, and then going over another crest of a hill to a narrower road yet, you'll see that I changed colors from dark to a lighter gray to accent the hill. The foreground hill is a little bit darker than the background hill, also. The final step I did to force the distance and make it look like this road is going over rolling terrain is the telephone poles. Now these two are the same scale. I pushed this one a little deeper into the scenery, painted one that was about half the distance or half the size between the foreground and the background, and some smaller telephone poles in the background. This is intended to not only hide where the road enters the backdrop, but give some impression of depth. This is a pretty effective way. This technique of stepped roads works very well on rural. It can also work on city scenes as you can see on my layout. I hope these techniques will help you solve some challenge areas on your railroad.
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