Need help with scenery

[Anonymous]

Hi,
I am planning a diorama of a train crash. It will be on a board about 3ft LONG x 1 1/2 ft WIDE . I plan to mail it when it is finished and my past experience with post offices they are rough! I need to make a grassy small bank on each sides of the tracks leveling out to a flat area. Without using plaster and screen is there another way? It has to be durable and be able to hold tightly on the plywood. I have been out of the hobby for 20 or so yeqars and I know there are alot of improvements. Any help or comments is greatly Apreciated. Thanks,Mark

[Javern]

you could carve foam into a mound shape and glue it to the plywood with wood glue or caulk, then paint the foam a earth color and then use white glue to adhere scenic foam and grass

[egmurphy]

I agree that foam would be the way to go. If you glue it to a plywood base it ought to be plenty strong. Here are a few shots of a small diorama I recently did using the foam technique. It's a bit smaller than yours, but the idea is the same.




Regards

Ed

[Anonymous]

Ed,
Those pics are very helpfull. That is a very nice dio. I hope mine turns out that well. One more question though where can I get the foam like that? I have been here to the local hobby stores and have never seen it. Thanks agin you guys..........Mark

[egmurphy]

The foam I used is the extruded foam insulation material. It comes in 4 x 8 sheets. I bought mine at a Home Depot or Lowe's. In the south you can only find sheets about 3/4" thick, but I suspect up north in cooler climates they might offer thicker sheets. There's a blue foam and a pink foam. I believe they're identical, just made by different manufacturers. IIRC the blue is by Dow and the pink by Owens Corning.

To stick the foam to plywood or foam to foam (to form higher sections) use a glue that won't attack the foam. I used "Liquid Nails For Projects". Some other types of glue (including some Liquid Nails products) will attack the foam.

Also, paint foam with a latex paint. Using a solvent based paint can also attack the foam.

The ground cover on my diorama is also the Woodlands Scenic ground foam in different textures (fine, coarse, underbrush, and bushes) glued down with a mix of white glue and water.

Check out the threads on 'Painting Styrofoam' and 'Foam to Plywood' that are currently on either pages 1 or 2 of the forum. Try searching on 'foam'and 'scenery'. Also check the Model Railroader forum on 'Layouts and layout building'.

Regards

Ed

[Javern]

if you have some construction going on near you there are always scraps of foam blowing around and in trash heaps, I'm sure if you approached the crew chief of the site and asked for some scraps that is an option, another option is to get a can of the spray insulating foam, you can get the expanding kind or non expanding, spray a mound on some wax paper and then let it set up, then shape it with a knife.

[Anonymous]

Thanks a bunch guys all very good comments. I am now off to the local lowes.

I will be posting my finished project when it is done. It is the famous wreck of Casey Jones modeled in ho scale, complete with the Illinois Central cannon ball cars and a badly splintered freight train. I am waiting for some of my cars to come in yet from the internet. Mean while I am working on the diorama. Thanks for all the help guys...Mark

[egmurphy]

Here you go. This is a shot of the Casey Jones Museum at Vaughan, Mississippi. I'm told this is not the original station, but was moved here from another location. The museum was closed the day we visited, so I didn't see the inside.



Here's a shot of the current siding at Vaughan. They told me the original siding (at the time of the wreck) came from the other direction, but this is the way it looks today.



Be sure to upload pictures of your diorama when it's done!

Regards

Ed