Building model railway scenery took lot's of practice before I began to be able to make my railroad system have that realistic appearance. It seemed that each time I tried I got a little bit better and the nice thing about model railway scenery is you can restart over and try again. I highly recommend getting information about using the different types of methods used for creating quality scenery for your model railway. Preferable information that has lots of clearly explained illustrations. Or you can even take a picture of an area that you want to recreate and created it onto your railroad model scenery setup. This part of your model railroading experience will bring (or develop) the artistic side of you. Most of the scenic model railway building techniques are similar but a lot of railroad modelers have and use their own techniques.  

Beautiful Fall Railway Model Scenery.

You can use wood to cut out your designs for your scenes such as for buildings. This can take more work and sometimes it is harder to work with wood. That is why I prefer using Woodland Scenic’s Sub Terrain System as it is easier to work with and lighter. It is a high-density foam material that comes in different sizes and thicknesses. It is easy to cut out rocks, sides of a hill or edges of a mountain lake. But for bigger objects such as mountains I like using a combination of piled up wood for height, screening for filling areas and then adding plaster of Paris for the top and sides of the screen to create the mountain effect. You can make the steep cliff shapes or whatever you want easily with this method.

To get that realistic look don’t pack into an area too much. Take a look at any scenery (not inside a city) and you will see some open land areas that don’t have buildings or anything else for that matter on it. In this case you don’t want to leave it totally baron so you will need to use a simple “but very effective” technique called “fillers” to cover these areas.

Here are some tips:

1. Cover this area with dark to medium dirt.
2. Use a finer mesh kitchen sifter and sift the dirt through it. You can run it through just once for a chunkier looking area or sift it several times to make it a smoother dirt looking like a plowed field just before planting crops.
3. I also like using tea leaves. I buy the least expensive tea leaves available in a grocery store and I spread them over that area in the selected spots to give it a look of dead leaves on the ground (this works great!).

An effective way to make background objects seem far away to the eye is to use the “forced perspective” techniques. To do this you need to make objects in the background smaller in scale than they normally are. Such as scenery with a row of trees located far back against a mountain you will need to make the trees smaller and darker in color to give the deception that the trees are far away.

Not in to painting backdrops then try photographic backdrops. I have taken a picture of a scene outdoors that I wanted for my railroad backdrop. I then had the print turned into a poster size printing, then I trimmed the edges down and put it on my wall for that perfect scenic backdrop. I once even had a print develop into a 4’ x 6’ printing and it made a perfect backdrop scene.  You can also purchase photographic backdrops from most hobby stores.

Photographic Backdrop Adds Scenery & Depth.

Most model railroaders like to do the scenery finish with a water soluble color painting system. Water soluble materials can be mixed, thinned and cleaned up with water. There are no messy chemicals or fumes or chance of a fire to worry about. Also another advantage is most water soluble products are fully compatible with each other therefore you can start and stop a section of the scenery you are building and then continue at a later date and the colors will blend in perfectly. This makes it easier and more forgiving to work with. But no railroad scenery will look nice without a plan.

Building sceneries is a vast art and a skill that takes time to develop. There are several good books on the subject that go into detail. It is a subject that you can read and learn about for a long time and as I already said after you have done it for awhile you too, like other long time railroaders, will develop your own techniques for giving you the perfect realistic railroad scenes.

Forever a Model Railroader, Billy Jamison!