Building retaining walls

[Anonymous]

I need some pointers, either to sites/books or advice on building retaining walls for my HO layout. It is set in the east coal country circa 1900, West Virginia-ish. The stone walls ( random and cut) seem easy enough - bought or carved. But what about other types? What options are there?

Allen
NY&Eastern RR
http://modelrr.adbyrne.us

[dano99a]

My retaining walls can be seen here, they are made of black Foam core board. Then painted to be grey like concrete.

http://www.crtraincrew.com/layouts/dan.html

[cwclark]

woodland scenic's has a nice set of retaining walls and scratch building them from plaster of paris is easy also (just time consuming because the rocks have to be hand carved with a hobby knife...i also use a stone print paper wall from fallen that works well..the stone is made of paper but they look great..they come in sheets and aren't very expensive...balsa wood can also make nice retaining walls by building a wooden plank wall retainer...Chuck

[jrbarney]

Allen,
I did a keyword search in the Index of Magazines using "retaining wall" as the search term. Here's a link:
http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=S&cmdtext=RETAINING+WALL&sort=A&output=3&view=0
You'll have to sort through the 29 articles cited to decide which you think are appropriate for your desired era and location.
Bob
NMRA Life 0543

[Anonymous]

Plastruct also makes various types of pre-formed, relatively thin styrene sheets that look like wood, concrete blocks, stones, etc. Easy to cut to shape, and thin enough to be attached to a foam or light wood backing to make pretty decent retaining walls.

[Anonymous]

Sometimes they're necessary or desired but IMHO retaining walls are overdone and the result of poor layout planning. Parallel (or closeby) tracks requiring that much vertical separation not only are unrealistic, they just don't look good.

[Anonymous]

Thanks!

I guess I'll be doing a bit of research on this!