Cathead

Continuing the scenery, I began working on the more robust parts of the landscape by installing webs of cardboard strips shaped to roughly outline the terrain I wanted. This is a tried and true method that gives a lot of flexibility and uses easily scavenged material. It'll be hard to recognize in photos but, as a geologist, I put a lot of thought and planning into shaping this terrain to match the real landscape here. As stated before, Rocheport is bookended to the west by a high ridge that the railroad tunneled right through, and to the east by a long series of high bluffs parallel to the Missouri River, with the rail line sandwiched between rock and river.



With the webbing done to my liking (including some adjustments), I began using plaster cloth to make a solid base layer. The old-school way to do this was to mix up your own plaster and dip paper towels in it, but this was always super-messy and hard to get amounts right. The more modern approach involves various products that embed a light paper roll with dry plaster, and all you have to do is dip it in water. Virtually no mess and a lot easier to do.
 




You may have noticed the odd rectangular indentation in the bluff on the far right side of the scene. That's a specific local feature; the limestone in this region is pockmarked with karst features like caves, springs, etc. I'll be including some minor examples on the bluffs, but there was/is a larger cave-entrance overhang at the base of the bluffs right along the tracks. When this line was being built, the railroad walled in this opening to use as an explosives storage area. It remains today as a notable landmark along the modern rail trail, and I just had to include it. Here's what it looks like today:

So that'll be a fun mini-scratchbuild!
 
Next stage in the scenery is to start using plaster to really form the bedrock bluffs, river banks, and essentially seal in the landscape the way I want. This will take a while.
 
Other notes:
- I didn't really photograph the process, but you'll notice that the backdrops were installed. They're currently primed but I won't finish them until more foreground scenery is done.
- You'll also notice that I installed the fascia boards that seal in the front of the layout. Like the backdrop, I won't paint these until more scenery is done.
- The bluff on the left side, through which the tunnel runs, is pretty close to the actual scale height of the ridge there. It looks a bit "model railroad" if you don't realize it's exactly how the real thing is.
- The bluffs on the right side, along the Missouri River, are less than half the scale height of the real thing (on the layout they're a scale 90-100' high, in real life they're 200-300'). They still look a bit abrupt because of the horizontal shortening I had to do, and one of the scenic challenges here was finding the balance between making this scenery dramatic enough to capture the feel of the real thing, but not so dramatic that it looks "fake". I wish I had four more feel of horizontal space to make a really nice run of bluffs, the real railroad parallels these towering features for miles, but this is the best I can do.
 
Thanks for all the likes, comments, input, stories, etc.! I'm really looking forward to two things: getting some color on this scenery, and getting tracks laid so I can see some motion here! And I hope you'll enjoy getting there too. Soon I hope to write up some more background stuff to provide more context for the project. But I appreciate you all!
 

 
 

Good question. For the club layout above, it was a combination of commercial rock molds and hand-molded, all using Scultamold brand plaster, which is my favorite medium for texture and workability. On the Rocheport scene it'll all be hand-sculpted. Mostly forming as I go with wet plaster, with some later touchup.
 
I don't think I said this clearly, but the last scenery post caught us up to real-time on this project. Nothing's been done that you can't see in the images shown. So I'll definitely be covering my process once I get started on it! It'll be a few weeks because I have a few really busy weeks coming up with family visits and extra work commitments.

Good question. For the club layout above, it was a combination of commercial rock molds and hand-molded, all using Scultamold brand plaster, which is my favorite medium for texture and workability. On the Rocheport scene it'll all be hand-sculpted. Mostly forming as I go with wet plaster, with some later touchup.
 
I don't think I said this clearly, but the last scenery post caught us up to real-time on this project. Nothing's been done that you can't see in the images shown. So I'll definitely be covering my process once I get started on it! It'll be a few weeks because I have a few really busy weeks coming up with family visits and extra work commitments.

Yep, if you look back at the "context" shots from Rocheport, you'll see how complex the rock faces are there. Horizontal bedding, but shot through with layers of chert nodules and highly variable surfaces due to the karstic nature of the area. Also different geomorphology as you go up in the sequence from track level. It'll be a fun challenge. I also feel that the best scenery balances accuracy and realism. For example, some features can be accurate but "look" wrong to a viewer's eye, and my goal is for things to "look" right more than "be" right. A great example is lowing the height of the bluffs, even though that means I can't incorporate the entire stratigraphy there at scale. A 200' bluff in this scene would look toylike without the horizontal scale to match, no matter how accurate it is.

I agree, and now the bar is even higher with you following along! Here's a few hints, from scenery work I've been doing at a local model railroad club depicting this region as well (though not exactly the same locations). The photo quality isn't great but it's still some context.

A core thing for me in making realistic rockwork is NOT to make a solid wall. Almost all real rock exposures, even those that have been blasted, have a lot of texture and variability. Rock faces are almost always broken up by scree slopes, soil-covered areas, etc. The above shot shows what I mean; to my eye this is far more realistic than a single slab of rock all the way along this scene. 
 
Here's a closer look at part of this face:
 

This area is limestone as well, and though the color balance here is terrible, the rocks are washed with both grey and tan shades to capture the actual mix of weathered and fresh faces in this formation.
 
Below is yet another bad photo of a local creek bed. I was really constrained on this one because the benchwork pattern was set for this before I joined the club, and I wouldn't have laid the creek out as a straight-sided slab, but I did what I could with it. Creeks are here are routinely lined by nearly horizontal beds of limestone, giving long linear runs of rock along the water, with coarse gravel bars separating pools.
 

And here's a broader shot showing how even partial scenery work can come together:
 

 
All of these scenes need vegetation, which will also help tie the scenes together AND further break up the rock work. But it's been good warmup work for my own project. The way my plaster shell has been laid out is far from random and I'll talk more in a different post about some of the specific choices I made in shaping those areas with reference to the real scenic setting.

Good question. For the club layout above, it was a combination of commercial rock molds and hand-molded, all using Scultamold brand plaster, which is my favorite medium for texture and workability. On the Rocheport scene it'll all be hand-sculpted. Mostly forming as I go with wet plaster, with some later touchup.
 
I don't think I said this clearly, but the last scenery post caught us up to real-time on this project. Nothing's been done that you can't see in the images shown. So I'll definitely be covering my process once I get started on it! It'll be a few weeks because I have a few really busy weeks coming up with family visits and extra work commitments.

Yep, if you look back at the "context" shots from Rocheport, you'll see how complex the rock faces are there. Horizontal bedding, but shot through with layers of chert nodules and highly variable surfaces due to the karstic nature of the area. Also different geomorphology as you go up in the sequence from track level. It'll be a fun challenge. I also feel that the best scenery balances accuracy and realism. For example, some features can be accurate but "look" wrong to a viewer's eye, and my goal is for things to "look" right more than "be" right. A great example is lowing the height of the bluffs, even though that means I can't incorporate the entire stratigraphy there at scale. A 200' bluff in this scene would look toylike without the horizontal scale to match, no matter how accurate it is.

I agree, and now the bar is even higher with you following along! Here's a few hints, from scenery work I've been doing at a local model railroad club depicting this region as well (though not exactly the same locations). The photo quality isn't great but it's still some context.

A core thing for me in making realistic rockwork is NOT to make a solid wall. Almost all real rock exposures, even those that have been blasted, have a lot of texture and variability. Rock faces are almost always broken up by scree slopes, soil-covered areas, etc. The above shot shows what I mean; to my eye this is far more realistic than a single slab of rock all the way along this scene. 
 
Here's a closer look at part of this face:
 

This area is limestone as well, and though the color balance here is terrible, the rocks are washed with both grey and tan shades to capture the actual mix of weathered and fresh faces in this formation.
 
Below is yet another bad photo of a local creek bed. I was really constrained on this one because the benchwork pattern was set for this before I joined the club, and I wouldn't have laid the creek out as a straight-sided slab, but I did what I could with it. Creeks are here are routinely lined by nearly horizontal beds of limestone, giving long linear runs of rock along the water, with coarse gravel bars separating pools.
 

And here's a broader shot showing how even partial scenery work can come together:
 

 
All of these scenes need vegetation, which will also help tie the scenes together AND further break up the rock work. But it's been good warmup work for my own project. The way my plaster shell has been laid out is far from random and I'll talk more in a different post about some of the specific choices I made in shaping those areas with reference to the real scenic setting.

Our club layout in Hendersonville has tried to do similar terrain, although we have a more heavily forested area of the US. And out building materials are pretty much identical. I'm following along to see your version of terrain and it's comparison to our attempts. Build on, Eric. 👍

Good question. For the club layout above, it was a combination of commercial rock molds and hand-molded, all using Scultamold brand plaster, which is my favorite medium for texture and workability. On the Rocheport scene it'll all be hand-sculpted. Mostly forming as I go with wet plaster, with some later touchup.
 
I don't think I said this clearly, but the last scenery post caught us up to real-time on this project. Nothing's been done that you can't see in the images shown. So I'll definitely be covering my process once I get started on it! It'll be a few weeks because I have a few really busy weeks coming up with family visits and extra work commitments.

Yep, if you look back at the "context" shots from Rocheport, you'll see how complex the rock faces are there. Horizontal bedding, but shot through with layers of chert nodules and highly variable surfaces due to the karstic nature of the area. Also different geomorphology as you go up in the sequence from track level. It'll be a fun challenge. I also feel that the best scenery balances accuracy and realism. For example, some features can be accurate but "look" wrong to a viewer's eye, and my goal is for things to "look" right more than "be" right. A great example is lowing the height of the bluffs, even though that means I can't incorporate the entire stratigraphy there at scale. A 200' bluff in this scene would look toylike without the horizontal scale to match, no matter how accurate it is.

I agree, and now the bar is even higher with you following along! Here's a few hints, from scenery work I've been doing at a local model railroad club depicting this region as well (though not exactly the same locations). The photo quality isn't great but it's still some context.

A core thing for me in making realistic rockwork is NOT to make a solid wall. Almost all real rock exposures, even those that have been blasted, have a lot of texture and variability. Rock faces are almost always broken up by scree slopes, soil-covered areas, etc. The above shot shows what I mean; to my eye this is far more realistic than a single slab of rock all the way along this scene. 
 
Here's a closer look at part of this face:
 

This area is limestone as well, and though the color balance here is terrible, the rocks are washed with both grey and tan shades to capture the actual mix of weathered and fresh faces in this formation.
 
Below is yet another bad photo of a local creek bed. I was really constrained on this one because the benchwork pattern was set for this before I joined the club, and I wouldn't have laid the creek out as a straight-sided slab, but I did what I could with it. Creeks are here are routinely lined by nearly horizontal beds of limestone, giving long linear runs of rock along the water, with coarse gravel bars separating pools.
 

And here's a broader shot showing how even partial scenery work can come together:
 

 
All of these scenes need vegetation, which will also help tie the scenes together AND further break up the rock work. But it's been good warmup work for my own project. The way my plaster shell has been laid out is far from random and I'll talk more in a different post about some of the specific choices I made in shaping those areas with reference to the real scenic setting.

I agree, and now the bar is even higher with you following along! Here's a few hints, from scenery work I've been doing at a local model railroad club depicting this region as well (though not exactly the same locations). The photo quality isn't great but it's still some context.

A core thing for me in making realistic rockwork is NOT to make a solid wall. Almost all real rock exposures, even those that have been blasted, have a lot of texture and variability. Rock faces are almost always broken up by scree slopes, soil-covered areas, etc. The above shot shows what I mean; to my eye this is far more realistic than a single slab of rock all the way along this scene. 
 
Here's a closer look at part of this face:
 

This area is limestone as well, and though the color balance here is terrible, the rocks are washed with both grey and tan shades to capture the actual mix of weathered and fresh faces in this formation.
 
Below is yet another bad photo of a local creek bed. I was really constrained on this one because the benchwork pattern was set for this before I joined the club, and I wouldn't have laid the creek out as a straight-sided slab, but I did what I could with it. Creeks are here are routinely lined by nearly horizontal beds of limestone, giving long linear runs of rock along the water, with coarse gravel bars separating pools.
 

And here's a broader shot showing how even partial scenery work can come together:
 

 
All of these scenes need vegetation, which will also help tie the scenes together AND further break up the rock work. But it's been good warmup work for my own project. The way my plaster shell has been laid out is far from random and I'll talk more in a different post about some of the specific choices I made in shaping those areas with reference to the real scenic setting.

I agree, and now the bar is even higher with you following along! Here's a few hints, from scenery work I've been doing at a local model railroad club depicting this region as well (though not exactly the same locations). The photo quality isn't great but it's still some context.

A core thing for me in making realistic rockwork is NOT to make a solid wall. Almost all real rock exposures, even those that have been blasted, have a lot of texture and variability. Rock faces are almost always broken up by scree slopes, soil-covered areas, etc. The above shot shows what I mean; to my eye this is far more realistic than a single slab of rock all the way along this scene. 
 
Here's a closer look at part of this face:
 

This area is limestone as well, and though the color balance here is terrible, the rocks are washed with both grey and tan shades to capture the actual mix of weathered and fresh faces in this formation.
 
Below is yet another bad photo of a local creek bed. I was really constrained on this one because the benchwork pattern was set for this before I joined the club, and I wouldn't have laid the creek out as a straight-sided slab, but I did what I could with it. Creeks are here are routinely lined by nearly horizontal beds of limestone, giving long linear runs of rock along the water, with coarse gravel bars separating pools.
 

And here's a broader shot showing how even partial scenery work can come together:
 

 
All of these scenes need vegetation, which will also help tie the scenes together AND further break up the rock work. But it's been good warmup work for my own project. The way my plaster shell has been laid out is far from random and I'll talk more in a different post about some of the specific choices I made in shaping those areas with reference to the real scenic setting.

Good question. For the club layout above, it was a combination of commercial rock molds and hand-molded, all using Scultamold brand plaster, which is my favorite medium for texture and workability. On the Rocheport scene it'll all be hand-sculpted. Mostly forming as I go with wet plaster, with some later touchup.
 
I don't think I said this clearly, but the last scenery post caught us up to real-time on this project. Nothing's been done that you can't see in the images shown. So I'll definitely be covering my process once I get started on it! It'll be a few weeks because I have a few really busy weeks coming up with family visits and extra work commitments.

I think understanding patterns, such as bedding or fractures that determine weathering forms are important to make this realistic.

I'm curious Eric. How do you "sculpt" your rock faces/outcroppings? Carve by hand ? Use rubber molds like those available from Woodland Scenics? Will you be covering this in more detail in subsequent posts? 

Yep, if you look back at the "context" shots from Rocheport, you'll see how complex the rock faces are there. Horizontal bedding, but shot through with layers of chert nodules and highly variable surfaces due to the karstic nature of the area. Also different geomorphology as you go up in the sequence from track level. It'll be a fun challenge. I also feel that the best scenery balances accuracy and realism. For example, some features can be accurate but "look" wrong to a viewer's eye, and my goal is for things to "look" right more than "be" right. A great example is lowing the height of the bluffs, even though that means I can't incorporate the entire stratigraphy there at scale. A 200' bluff in this scene would look toylike without the horizontal scale to match, no matter how accurate it is.

I agree, and now the bar is even higher with you following along! Here's a few hints, from scenery work I've been doing at a local model railroad club depicting this region as well (though not exactly the same locations). The photo quality isn't great but it's still some context.

A core thing for me in making realistic rockwork is NOT to make a solid wall. Almost all real rock exposures, even those that have been blasted, have a lot of texture and variability. Rock faces are almost always broken up by scree slopes, soil-covered areas, etc. The above shot shows what I mean; to my eye this is far more realistic than a single slab of rock all the way along this scene. 
 
Here's a closer look at part of this face:
 

This area is limestone as well, and though the color balance here is terrible, the rocks are washed with both grey and tan shades to capture the actual mix of weathered and fresh faces in this formation.
 
Below is yet another bad photo of a local creek bed. I was really constrained on this one because the benchwork pattern was set for this before I joined the club, and I wouldn't have laid the creek out as a straight-sided slab, but I did what I could with it. Creeks are here are routinely lined by nearly horizontal beds of limestone, giving long linear runs of rock along the water, with coarse gravel bars separating pools.
 

And here's a broader shot showing how even partial scenery work can come together:
 

 
All of these scenes need vegetation, which will also help tie the scenes together AND further break up the rock work. But it's been good warmup work for my own project. The way my plaster shell has been laid out is far from random and I'll talk more in a different post about some of the specific choices I made in shaping those areas with reference to the real scenic setting.

As it turns out, Mrs. Cathead is fully on board with all my modeling endeavors, she shares my interests in history and transportation and enjoys going train-watching and towboat-watching with me. She'll probably get involved in the more detailed scenery work, if nothing else because she's also a geologist and has Opinions about getting the landscape right. She's also a botanist and will definitely be involved in selecting and harvesting the various natural scenic materials we'll be using later on. She loves the Katy Trail too (we rode the whole thing together) and very much approves the idea of having an operating piece of its living history in the back bedroom. She also used to be an active researcher on the Missouri River so everything about this whole corridor is a shared love for both of us.

As it turns out, Mrs. Cathead is fully on board with all my modeling endeavors, she shares my interests in history and transportation and enjoys going train-watching and towboat-watching with me. She'll probably get involved in the more detailed scenery work, if nothing else because she's also a geologist and has Opinions about getting the landscape right. She's also a botanist and will definitely be involved in selecting and harvesting the various natural scenic materials we'll be using later on. She loves the Katy Trail too (we rode the whole thing together) and very much approves the idea of having an operating piece of its living history in the back bedroom. She also used to be an active researcher on the Missouri River so everything about this whole corridor is a shared love for both of us.

As it turns out, Mrs. Cathead is fully on board with all my modeling endeavors, she shares my interests in history and transportation and enjoys going train-watching and towboat-watching with me. She'll probably get involved in the more detailed scenery work, if nothing else because she's also a geologist and has Opinions about getting the landscape right. She's also a botanist and will definitely be involved in selecting and harvesting the various natural scenic materials we'll be using later on. She loves the Katy Trail too (we rode the whole thing together) and very much approves the idea of having an operating piece of its living history in the back bedroom. She also used to be an active researcher on the Missouri River so everything about this whole corridor is a shared love for both of us.

As it turns out, Mrs. Cathead is fully on board with all my modeling endeavors, she shares my interests in history and transportation and enjoys going train-watching and towboat-watching with me. She'll probably get involved in the more detailed scenery work, if nothing else because she's also a geologist and has Opinions about getting the landscape right. She's also a botanist and will definitely be involved in selecting and harvesting the various natural scenic materials we'll be using later on. She loves the Katy Trail too (we rode the whole thing together) and very much approves the idea of having an operating piece of its living history in the back bedroom. She also used to be an active researcher on the Missouri River so everything about this whole corridor is a shared love for both of us.

Continuing the scenery, I began working on the more robust parts of the landscape by installing webs of cardboard strips shaped to roughly outline the terrain I wanted. This is a tried and true method that gives a lot of flexibility and uses easily scavenged material. It'll be hard to recognize in photos but, as a geologist, I put a lot of thought and planning into shaping this terrain to match the real landscape here. As stated before, Rocheport is bookended to the west by a high ridge that the railroad tunneled right through, and to the east by a long series of high bluffs parallel to the Missouri River, with the rail line sandwiched between rock and river.



With the webbing done to my liking (including some adjustments), I began using plaster cloth to make a solid base layer. The old-school way to do this was to mix up your own plaster and dip paper towels in it, but this was always super-messy and hard to get amounts right. The more modern approach involves various products that embed a light paper roll with dry plaster, and all you have to do is dip it in water. Virtually no mess and a lot easier to do.
 




You may have noticed the odd rectangular indentation in the bluff on the far right side of the scene. That's a specific local feature; the limestone in this region is pockmarked with karst features like caves, springs, etc. I'll be including some minor examples on the bluffs, but there was/is a larger cave-entrance overhang at the base of the bluffs right along the tracks. When this line was being built, the railroad walled in this opening to use as an explosives storage area. It remains today as a notable landmark along the modern rail trail, and I just had to include it. Here's what it looks like today:

So that'll be a fun mini-scratchbuild!
 
Next stage in the scenery is to start using plaster to really form the bedrock bluffs, river banks, and essentially seal in the landscape the way I want. This will take a while.
 
Other notes:
- I didn't really photograph the process, but you'll notice that the backdrops were installed. They're currently primed but I won't finish them until more foreground scenery is done.
- You'll also notice that I installed the fascia boards that seal in the front of the layout. Like the backdrop, I won't paint these until more scenery is done.
- The bluff on the left side, through which the tunnel runs, is pretty close to the actual scale height of the ridge there. It looks a bit "model railroad" if you don't realize it's exactly how the real thing is.
- The bluffs on the right side, along the Missouri River, are less than half the scale height of the real thing (on the layout they're a scale 90-100' high, in real life they're 200-300'). They still look a bit abrupt because of the horizontal shortening I had to do, and one of the scenic challenges here was finding the balance between making this scenery dramatic enough to capture the feel of the real thing, but not so dramatic that it looks "fake". I wish I had four more feel of horizontal space to make a really nice run of bluffs, the real railroad parallels these towering features for miles, but this is the best I can do.
 
Thanks for all the likes, comments, input, stories, etc.! I'm really looking forward to two things: getting some color on this scenery, and getting tracks laid so I can see some motion here! And I hope you'll enjoy getting there too. Soon I hope to write up some more background stuff to provide more context for the project. But I appreciate you all!
 

 
 

As it turns out, Mrs. Cathead is fully on board with all my modeling endeavors, she shares my interests in history and transportation and enjoys going train-watching and towboat-watching with me. She'll probably get involved in the more detailed scenery work, if nothing else because she's also a geologist and has Opinions about getting the landscape right. She's also a botanist and will definitely be involved in selecting and harvesting the various natural scenic materials we'll be using later on. She loves the Katy Trail too (we rode the whole thing together) and very much approves the idea of having an operating piece of its living history in the back bedroom. She also used to be an active researcher on the Missouri River so everything about this whole corridor is a shared love for both of us.