Fences

Building our model railway is about experimenting and learning. We've gone for a mixture of building styles and types with different finishes, as indeed you would find in any town with a bit of history to it.

The same can be said of fences. It would be rather flat and boring to have the same sort of fence all over the layout. So far we have three types of fence. Two have been 3D printed and one is completely handmade. One of the 3D printed fences runs along the side of the track one the east side of the layout. You can see some of it in this photograph:

The ,layout is more developed now and this fence encloses the green area. It even has a couple of gates in it for access.

The handmade fence is constructed from matchsticks and floristry wire. It's all high tech stuff here! The matchsticks need to have 1mm holes drilled through them to take the wire that is painstakingly threaded through. 3mm holes drilled in the base board at 25mm centres locate the sticks. I'll add a dab of PVA later to secure them, but they are a reasonably snug fit, so nu rush.

I've tried a couple of ways to weather them. A mixture of a burnt umber acrylic wash and the more recent batch that are currently drying have been dipped in a wood stain.

To drill the holes I lined up a whole bunch of matchsticks on a piece of double-sided tape in a small jig made from off-cuts of ply. Then a steady hand with a hand-drill and taking my time I made the holes. Some of the matchstick split, but that was okay because they could still be used and they gave the fence a more aged looked with little bits broken away.

The matchsticks I used came without the live end. you buy them for modelling purposes this way in a big bag of about 1000.

Scenery: 2

Having more or less completed the scenery on one side of the layout, it's time to turn my attention to another corner. Given that we have the inclines, there's an opportunity to experiment with different ways of disguising the hardboard support structure.

Around the bridge I simple used brick and stone effect card to give a walled finish. I've also painted the grainy side of the exposed hardboard grey to see if that looks okay. On the inside of the incline I'll use brick card again, but on the other outside edge I wanted to try and sculpt a rock type look.

Here's what I did.

First of all I used a Woodland Scenics rock mould to cast some rock face material. I've used this above my tunnel entrances on another corner of the layout. Then I used Sculptamold to provide a bed for these rocks and to fill in the gaps. As it dried I poked it with my fingers, a small paintbrush and a scalpel to blend it all together.

You can see one of the rock mould pieces picked out in grey (and there's a pile of them in the bottom right-hand corner of the photo too(. Once it had all dried I added grey by dabbing spots on the surface and then brushing out unevenly over the surface allowing bits of white to remain. I then used a black wash over the top f that.

The end result is quite a pleasing effect and the sculptamold worked really well. As it dries you can wet your hand and smooth and shape the surface. On my hillside above the tunnel I kept going like this until I got the shape and finish I was looking for before I applied static grass.

 I thought the electrics and running the trains was going to be the most interesting part of building the model railway, but experimenting with the scenery has been a lot of fun and a challenge too.