Tips for Building a Model Railroad: Minimizing Spaces

Okay. So what can you do right now to help de-emphasize the fact that you've got a lot of layout and a lot of flat plywood? Well, it goes all the way back to the time when you're planning your truckage add some curves, some gentle curves in there long stretches, a straight truck, do nothing more than emphasize the fact that there is a lot of flat land. Curves help draw your eye away from that a little bit. Secondly, whether you're using plywood or pink or blue foam insulation, paint it, get some dark brown paint from your paint store or your hardware store and paint all that pink, blue, or plywood nice dark Brown that will draw more attention to the trains and the trucks and less attention to those big flat areas. And you can do that right away to help de-emphasize the fact that you've got a lot of layout on a lot of flat area. So even if you've got your whole layout done and you're not ready to do scenery yet you can de-emphasize the flatness of it that way. Something else you can do right away to minimize those big old flat lands on your layout is to paint the rails. Now, you know how fashion designers are always talking about how horizontal stripes makes things look wider Well, in this case, those horizontal stripes are your rails. And by painting the rails, you actually minimize the size or at least it looks like you minimize the size of those rails. If you take a look at the trucks right here I've painted the rails in the background but I've left the two spurs in the foreground unpainted. So we can paint those right now but you can see how those rails in the background really look much smaller than the reels in the foreground. Now, how do you paint the rails? Well, there's a number of ways that you can do it. Many modelers will take a can of spray paint and just spray the entire tyres and the rails. It's much easier to do that when you have the rails loose and you can bring them out to the garage or out to the yard and paint them that way. It gets a little messy when you're using spray paint on the layout, because you've gotta do a lot of masking to make sure that you're not spraying your backdrop and other things that you don't necessarily wanna spray. Also, you need to take a great deal of care around your turnouts so that the mechanisms will still work after that paint dries. Another way of doing it is to simply just take a little jar of paint and paint and drag that along the web of the rails. It's easy enough to do and you can paint the Web of the rails fairly quickly. But one other way that you can use our paint markers. A couple of companies make paint markers. In this case, I'm gonna be using some paint markers by Woodland Scenics. They come usually in three colors, there's a rail color a rusty rail color, a weathered tie color. And in our case we're gonna be using the, the rust marker. We're gonna be coloring the rust the web of those rails rust. And in my case I've just arbitrarily chosen to paint my main line and my sightings, a darker rust color, but paint my spurs a lighter rust color simply for when operators come over it's easy to immediately spot which trucks are the spurs and which trucks are the main line. So let's get started with that. And to do that, I'm gonna be kneeling down and getting a little bit closer to the truck here. So the paint markers are very, very, very easy to use you. You simply shake them up a little bit. There's a mixer inside that will you can hear it rattling in there. And when it rattles enough, it's just like a spray of can of spray paint. When it rattles, you know that you're actually mixing the paint that's inside. Then what you wanna do is you wanna make sure that you have paint on the tip of the marker. So you'll bounce this a little bit on a piece of paper like that, and you can see that paint coming out. And again, this is paint. This is not magic marker. So you're literally painting those, the web of those rails. And we'll just start by dragging this along the side of the rails. And you can see when you get that marker right in that web it will cover over saddle marks. And I mean saddle joints, it will cover over any other imperfections in the side of that rail. And you can see right away and I'll do the one in the back. You can see right away that that rail is looking much smaller apparently much smaller than it does than the rail behind it or than it did before I started painting it. Using paint markers is very, very quick. And the paint markers themselves are relatively inexpensive. Again, you can see here's a saddle joint and the rail joiner and you get enough paint on the marker tip. You can just paint right over that and it will visually disappear. Now. Normally I would paint the webs of the rails at the same time when I paint the tyres. And when I do the ballasting of the truck but in this case, we want to eliminate these these big old open spaces right away. So instead of painting the tyres and ballasting the truck right now we're just gonna be painting the rails and I'm gonna save the ballasting and a painting of the tyres for much, much later in the sinking process when we've got the whole rest of the the scene done. So that's one more way of minimizing those big old flat open spaces by minimizing the horizontal lines of your truck. Another thing you can do right now to draw visitors attention away from those big flat areas of your layout is by adding a backdrop. Now, backdrops can be as simple as just a piece of blue Mason aid or cardboard behind your truckage. And that'll go a long way to keep the railroad from looking like it ends at the wall. But you can also add a little bit more detail to your backdrops and that'll enhance the realism even further. You can paint your own backdrops if you have the talent or if you've got a friend who has the talent you can paint some wonderful scenes on your backdrop that go exactly with the foreground scenery. If you don't have the talent you can certainly consult the many, many model railroading articles, DVDs, and books on painting backdrops. And you'll find out that you don't need to make a Michael Angelo detailed a masterpiece of a backdrop that you can use sponges to hint a trees or just a swath of green to represent a field or a Hill. Again, they don't have to be very very detailed to enhance the realism of your layout. Another way that you can really enhance the realism of your layout with a backdrop is by using a photograph. Next time you're out on vacation or out in the country, or driving through the city. Stop, take some pictures, and you may be able to use those as backdrops on your layout. Be sure to take Panorama shots though take a shot a one way move the camera over a little bit, take another shot take another shot, take another shot, take another shot. And when you get home, you can print those out and probably use them as backdrops on your layout. But be sure that anything that happens to be in that photograph is okay for the era that you're modeling. What you don't want is a modern car in the foreground. If you're modeling the fifties or the forties. Another way of finding photographs, for a photographic backdrop on your layout is by searching the internet. You'll find all sorts of sources of great looking backdrops on the internet search, the DNR sites agricultural sites, industrial sites, fish, and wildlife. There are some great city cityscape shots some great industry shots on the internet that you can use as backdrops. Don't hesitate to use smaller shots either even though the shot may not be the executive the size that you need for your backdrop a smaller shot when you blow it up to backdrop size may get a little bit fuzzy but that may be okay because you don't necessarily want visitors to be looking at the backdrop. You just wanna give the impression that there's something back there. You also can do a Google search for model railroading backdrops and you'll find out that a lot of modelers just like you have posted their own photographs on the internet that you can download, print out and use for your backdrops. One way or the other If you use photographic backdrops you're probably going to need some good photo editing software. Photo editing software doesn't need to be expensive or complicated. You don't need the full Photoshop suite just to do the kind of editing that we need to do in model railroading. In fact, you can pick up the current version of Adobe Photoshop elements for just the cost of maybe two or three bucks cards. And if you go to eBay you can pick up Adobe Photoshop elements an earlier version of it for even a lot less money. And in fact, that will still do exactly what you need to do. If you're looking for free ware there's free ware available for both Mac and windows the most popular one is called GIMP. With photo editing software, you can make signs you can make billboards you can make all sorts of things for your model railroad including backdrops. Photo editing software makes it very very easy to change the color of a photograph that you've taken. In case it doesn't quite match what your view of the backdrop should be. Photo editing software makes it easy to change the brightness of a photograph. So if it's too bright, you can dark in it. If it's too dark you can lighten it. With photo editing software. You can even choose a certain section of the photograph and literally clone it so that you can move. In my case here, these stocks of corn all over the screen and don't have any grass in the foreground. Photo editing software is a tool that you'll be able to use for the life of your model railroad for making signs and billboards to making backdrops right now it may be the most versatile tool that you have for your model railroad. Once you've got a photograph picked out for your backdrop. The next thing you need to do is take a very sharp exacto knife and cut the sky away because 99 out of a hundred says that the color of the sky in your photograph is not gonna match the color of the sky on your backdrop. But the trick is leave just a little bit of the blue sky along the top of your backdrop. That way you don't have such a hard edge on trees and flowers and buildings. And that little bit of blue on the backdrop is certainly not going to show all that much against your backdrop. What I like to do before I permanently mount the backdrop to my Mason right here is to use some 3M liftoff tape. Now this is basically scotch brand tape that has the same adhesive on it as post-it notes. So it will, you can put it on, on your backdrop and lift it off very easily and it won't tear the paper. And so I use that to just temporarily Mount the backdrops to the wall. Just to get a good feel for how they're gonna look. I don't wanna commit myself to Mount these things right away until I get a feel for what's gonna go in the foreground and how I can live with the backdrops that I'm putting up. Another thing to remember is don't get too obsessive about the seams of your backdrop where the pieces may match up, because once you get a good backdrop on your layout your visitors are actually gonna be looking more at your three-dimensional scenery in the foreground than they are going to be staring at your backdrop. And if they're staring at your backdrop then you don't have good enough scenery in the foreground. So we just temporarily tack these pieces up. You can live with them for a few months, a few days a few weeks just to get a good feel for how well you're going to like that scenery. And once you commit to using that scenery you'll use some spray adhesive. I happened to use 3M Super 77. This is a very, very powerful spray adhesive. You spray it lightly on the backs of your backdrops your photographic backdrops, press them up against the Mason aid or cardboard or whatever it is that you're using styrene for your backdrops. And they will be permanently mounted there. Backdrops are a great way of drawing attention away from those empty flat areas. And they're an, an excellent way of really enhancing the realism of your layout. One final thing that you can do right now to really downplay those big flat boring areas of your layout is by increasing the size of your buildings making better use of the space that you have on your layout. You can see here I happened to be modeling an industrial area and by having three industries that are fairly small there's still an awful lot of that boring flat area that's left to be used. Adding larger buildings really gives a lot of details for visitors to look at and for you to look at too. The detail on the buildings and larger buildings will even draw attention away from your backdrop and certainly makes better use of all that wide open area there. So those are four things that you can do right now to minimize all of that wide open, boring space.