Considerations When Planning your Layout: Realistic Landscapes

Scenery to portray a particular part of the country should be planned from the beginning, not as an afterthought. You'll want to have diverse variety of scenes in both the foreground, and in the background. You might begin scenery planning by identifying well-known signature landscape features and simple scenic elements. These can include, the shapes and elevations of the natural terrain before the railroads were built. Roads, highways, land uses, and architecture communities, agriculture, forest, and industrial development, as well as the cross sections and shorelines of local valleys and waterways. To model landscapes outside of crowded urban and industrial areas, you'll need to have a relatively high ratio of scenery space to track area. Even if you don't prepare a detailed initial plan for your scenery, you should set aside enough space to keep your future options open. At a minimum, you'd be wise to leave room for a prototypical swath of terrain, at least 60 to 80 scale feet wide. Paul sketchy track plan and subsequent construction left room for his favorite scenery elements. Leaving at least three to six inches for foreground and rearward scenery, allowed Paul to build in extra scenery elements. As an avid structures modeler, Paul left the open space around building sites and alleys for breathing room, which avoided a crowded look. Room was also left for prototypical regional roads and driveways. Modelers seemed to appreciate a mix of shallow scenes and scenes deeper than 18 to 36 inches behind the tracks. Consider not coving some corners of your layout room's backdrop to preserve more open scenery space. Instead of a scattered mix of buildings throughout your layout, concentrating clusters of development enhances a sense of distance between places. Paul's landscape along its main line, alternates between developed industrial areas, and undeveloped rural woods or dairy farmland with no or small structures. Pay attention to natural terrain slopes and mimic them. Include slight grades, almost everywhere even below buildings and under roads. This is particularly important along the layouts fascia. Raise and lower the front edge of your layout scenery to reflect the plausible slice of your regions contours. In numerous places, it should be below the track and elsewhere have sections of foreground scenery rise above track height, partly blocking horizontal views of passing trains. Even before we install the layout's 3D terrain, Paul installed his fascial panel that gave early visitors a clear impression of how the surfaces were likely to look. In addition to terrain along the front of your layout, plan for some hills that are high in the foreground, and then climb or descend towards the rear backdrop. Visitors like varied scenery cross-sections, rather than track high terrain that has always level or slopes up from the isle edge or beyond the track. Match the height of your layouts backdrop horizon line above the track, to the perceived height of the most distant ridges or open fields. If the layout horizon line is too high, especially at actual eye level of an observer standing in the aisle, it will be impossible for visitors or cameras to get a realistic view of this scene. The wider your valleys, the lower your hilltop horizon line should be. Paul's backdrops contributes significantly to the layout's New England look and appeal. His horizon line for hillside ridges was placed six inches or lower above his tracks. The illusion makes scenery much more plausible. One of the most crucial under modeled keys to overall scenic realism, is matching the colors and textures of your prototype regions soils and ground vegetation. While Paul's layout is famous for its leafless trees, his coloring and textures of New England's diverse ground cover contributes significantly to his landscapes. The distinctive reddish-brown ground cover represents the accumulated debris of dead autumn leaves and evergreen needles. He pulverizes real leaves. Paul added fallen tree limbs, low shrubs and overgrown stone fences to create a scene similar to New England's abandoned farm fields. To fill in his open spaces and pastures, Paul used lots of dead summer grasses, regional granite stones, and glacial deposits. Model the gray cinder covered shoulders of railroad, sub-road, bed, and ditches. In the 1950s, trackside terrain and vegetation should rarely touch the edge of your ballast, except where maintenance has been neglected. Cover some spurs and yard tracks with debris like pulpwood bark, granite chips, mud, spilled coal, or sand from locomotives. Creating realistic scenery depends on studying the characteristics of the region that you're copying. Leave lots of open space for both foreground scenes and background scenes. Remember to leave room for natural looking slopes and to provide a contrast between the developed areas and the less developed areas. Also, remember to keep your backdrop horizon line low and to cover your ground with the same materials that you'd see on your real world.