Missouri, Kansas, & Texas Railroad along the Missouri River by Cathead - 1/87 (HO) scale - model railroad with steamboat

[Rik Thistle]

Eric,

 

This is all quite fascinating and informative for me, especially since you have a backgound in how landscapes are actually formed. 

 

I look forward to each post (and Comments) on the bridge and tunnel scene taking shape.  Keep 'em coming, thanks.

 

Richard

[Cathead]

7 hours ago, Keith Black said:

Are you using any flame retardant chemicals in the mix?

Interesting question; absolutely not. (a) I don't want to personally work with anything like that, (b) they're all set with glue and not sitting around like a light flammable powder, (c) any broader fire risk comes from the extensive wooden benchwork, not a thin skim of glue-fixed natural material. 

 

2 hours ago, Rik Thistle said:

This is all quite fascinating and informative for me, especially since you have a backgound in how landscapes are actually formed. 

Thanks! It's definitely a challenge thinking through the real setting and trying to figure out how to translate it into a version that's simultaneously scaled down but also true to eye.

 

Having said that, I should have waited to post the results above. Shortly after I did, Mrs. Scenic Consultant came in from the garden and had a look. She agreed that the material was coarser than scale, but also had a very good idea how to adjust it. She suggested rubbing off some of the coarsest outer layer, which I tried, and it worked brilliantly. What happened was that the material that had truly embedded in the glue stayed, dulling the painted plaster surface and giving a sense of texture, but some of the material that was sticking up more and really looking coarse went away, making the grain/particle size less obvious. It's a bit hard to explain this change, but I tried a series of photos this morning to see if I could get the comparison across.

 

(1) Original painted plaster creek bank. Too smooth, uniform, and shiny, though the color and base shape are good:

 

(2) Sifted leaf and sand application. Improves the texture and complexity, kills the "shine", but a bit coarse (I started to realize that the flatter surfaces looked a bit like a power company wood chipper had been through). And the area along the creek bank is a bit too gravely for an area that in real life is mostly muddy rather than rocky:

(3) Same texture after the upper layer has been rubbed away. Now there's a more subtle blend of "powder" and coarser material dulling the surface, maintaining that complex natural non-plaster look, but less of the "wood-chipper and gravel" effect:

I thought (2) was fine until I saw what (3) accomplished, and that's now the new approach. The material that gets rubbed off can be collected and re-used elsewhere, so it's not a waste.

 

It's less fun if you're not learning!

 

[Keith Black]

21 minutes ago, Cathead said:

Interesting question; absolutely not. (a) I don't want to personally work with anything like that, (b) they're all set with glue and not sitting around like a light flammable powder, (c) any broader fire risk comes from the extensive wooden benchwork, not a thin skim of glue-fixed natural material.

I don't blame you a bit. Crazy factoid about cigarette tobacco is, of the 1,000 chemicals used in manufacturing cigarette tobacco, flame retardant is one the chemicals used. 

 

 The last two photos in the post above are very convincing. 👍

[NavyShooter]

I'm not a railroad guy, but damn....this is beautiful work.  Your subject matter is interesting, and the history that all of this ties together is amazing...from the tales of how grain elevators worked back in the day to your leaf grinding...wow!  Definitely following this thread going forward!  Great work!

NS
 

[kgstakes]

ground up leaves and small sticks make great looking scenery.  Ground foam (woodland scenics) and Scenic Express both have lots of scenery material to choose from.  You can make your own trees or you can also buy them.  I usually do a mix of scratch built trees and store bought trees.

 

Your scenery looks great!!  Keep up the good work, can't wait to see more.

[kgstakes]

Just some ideas for ground cover.  Most is woodland scenics some trees are scenic express and the pine trees are made by me and the big tree behind the building is made from a sagebrush branch and then ground foam for foliage.  Don't forget to add some branches or sticks as dead fall trees or dead standing trees.  Makes the scene more believable. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited May 20 by kgstakes

[Cathead]

Thanks for sharing those great photos! You've done a nice job on your scenery. Do keep in mind that I'm modeling late fall / early winter, so a lot of the standard foliage products won't work for me. I also prefer to minimize the use of artificial stuff, though I'll certainly be using some. One of the reasons I'm focusing on this season is that it lets me use a much higher percentage of natural materials. But, for example, I intend to use some purchased static grass to help simulate the winter grasses so distinctive in this part of the world.

 

There will be plenty of fallen limbs/timber, especially along and in the creek. But on the other hand, keep in mind that this was the era when trees were at a minimum, so to speak, given the local demands for timber and firewood. Check out the historical photos posted earlier in the thread; the landscape was a lot more open than the lush regrowth people take for granted today. One of my interesting challenges will be balancing a historically accurate level of vegetation with an easily believed/accepted look, because modeling this truly accurately would make many modern viewers think it was farther west in, say, Montana, because they associate modern Missouri with lush (almost overwhelming) vegetation rather than the sparser "frontier" look it had around 1900.

[kgstakes]

very true years ago with steam locomotives and early settlements the landscape was totally different than it is today.

 

i lived in Colorado for many years and places in the mountains that are treed now were bare mountains back in the days of steam and mining.

 

i was just showing ideas and i forgot about the photos you were trying to create in miniature.  
 

you do nice work and look forward to the progress.

[Canute]

Thanks to steam exhaust products, like cinders and gases given off by coal combustion, the areas around rights of way were fairly denuded of any foliage. The diesel transition started the recovery of the forests near the tracks.

[kgstakes]

41 minutes ago, Canute said:

Thanks to steam exhaust products, like cinders and gases given off by coal combustion, the areas around rights of way were fairly denuded of any foliage. The diesel transition started the recovery of the forests near the tracks.

And every once in awhile the steam locomotives cinders would light a fire on the roadbed and clear weeds and sometimes bridges🤪🤪.  That’s why you would see an inspection car running a mile or two behind the train to put out anything that caught fire.

Edited May 21 by kgstakes

[kgstakes]

Railroads had these weed burners  back in the day of steam and newer versions today to keep weeds down on the roadways.

 

Edited May 21 by kgstakes

[wefalck]

We lived for a couple of years near a branch-line during the last days of steam back in later 1960s Germany and used to play around the embankments. One day we had to alarm the adults as indeed some shrubs/weeds had caught fire after a steam-train passed.

It seems that this, however, was less likely with coal-fired engines, while wood- (or peat-fired, as was the case for a period in Bavaria) always had those bulbous spark-arrester chimneys.

 

Edited May 22 by wefalck

[Cathead]

I've made broader progress that I'm not quite ready to write up yet, but here's a narrower update on a minor upgrade. The shape of the tunnel has been bugging me; it seems too squat. It wasn't really obvious to me until I'd finished the bluff, but now I can't un-see it. I think you can see what I mean in the paired photo below. The real one is significantly rectangular; mine is nearly square. Bugs me.

 

So I decided to renovate it. This meant raising the ceiling and narrowing the sides. Starting point:

I used a woodworking tool I had in a drawer, a rotary rasp that chucks into a power drill. It's meant for rough shaping of wood, but boy is it perfect for boring out a tunnel.

Then I filled in the sides with some new plaster.

Gave it a fresh base coat of paint:

And weathered it down:

That's much better. The beauty of this is that I'm modeling the period not long after this tunnel was freshly blasted. So it's actually perfect to have the area right around the portal look a little disrupted and different from the rest of the rock. I didn't weather it quite as much, leaving the color a little fresher. 

 

I'm pretty pleased with how this came out. Just shows it's worth going back and reassessing your work now and then. 

 

I've also been working on the longer bluff line on the other end of town, along the river, but am not quite ready to share that progress yet. Thanks for the fun discussions above, and for all your interest!

 

 

 

Edited May 28 by Cathead

[wefalck]

Yes, it looks more railway tunnel-like and not just like a hole in the mountain 👍🏻

[Keith Black]

Eric, that took a bit of nerve to do that but your tunnel entrance looks a lot more convincing. 👍

[Cathead]

Less mineshaft, more tunnel.

[Canute]

Good job on your rock-cut tunnel. It's looking good.

[_SalD_]

Eric,  Good choice to fix the tunnel, if you didn't it would have bugged you forever (I know from experience).

[Cathead]

OK, here's a broader update covering the last week or so. I've been filling in the bluff line to the right with plaster and base color layers. 

 

Base plaster layer shaped into rock faces and outcrops:

Early paint layers:

Adding more color complexity:

And since this is Model SHIP World, here's a reminder that this whole scene was inspired by Peerless operating on this stretch of the Missouri River.

Right now this all still looks like Montana, not Missouri, in the absence of vegetation. But it's coming along. I'm not done with bluff coloration, I'm still planning to build up more color complexity and texture, as on the tunnel bluff. Here's a reference shot as a reminder:

And a historical reminder:

In the next post I'll share an interesting broader view.

 

[Cathead]

So here's a low-angle 3D view of the landscape at Rocheport, looking north at roughly the same perspective the viewer of the layout has. This is taken from the US Geological Survey's National Map online map data server, something I use all the time in my day to day work. From left to right, you can follow the rail line through the tunnel at the nose of the left-hand ridge, across the bridge over Moniteau Creek, through the town of Rocheport on the flat riverbottoms between the two lines of hills, then back to the sheer bedrock bluffs along the Missouri River at far right.

And the reason I share this, is that here is the current layout's version of that view:

You can see that I've started painting the backdrop as well, giving rough shape to the line of hills framing the Moniteau Creek valley in the background and giving the scene some depth. Maybe this helps give some more geographic context to what I'm building here. If you're wondering, the bluffs on the right side are quite a bit shorter than the real thing; I simply don't have vertical space to build them to scale, and even if I did they'd probably look fake. This height uses the principle of selective compression, as does so much of model railroading, to give what I think is a proper sense of scale and proportion that "feels" right. Same for the horizontal compression of Rocheport, which has a far longer distance between the two bluffs than I can include here, but I've planned the town's layout to include enough signature features so that it'll "feel" right.

 

Hope you enjoy these shots. I'm getting relatively close to being comfortable with the idea of actually laying tracks and being able to operate a train through here, which will be a very exciting development. Thanks, as always, for all the various expressions of interest and support!

 

[Keith Black]

 What a grand palette for artistic expression, Eric. I love it! 

[Cathead]

I realized I should probably give a labelled version of that 3D map, not assuming everyone knows/remembers the geography as well as I do. So here it is for comparison with the broad layout view:

Edited Sunday at 12:01 AM by Cathead

[Cathead]

I decided it was time to start adding vegetation to the Moniteau Creek area. As a reminder, this area was pretty grassy/weedy/scruffy back then, with scattered bushes and a handful of trees.

 

So I started with a layer of complex grasses. Modelers often use static grass for this, which is a product consisting of fine grains that are applied onto a glued surface and then made to stand up vertically using static charge. It actually works quite well, but my problem was that static grass doesn't come in the proper brown/deep yellow shade of late fall Missouri prairie grass. I also find that most manufactured scenery products never manage to have the subtle complexity in color and texture that natural materials do (just like the ground cover already used). But I found a really effective natural replacement that comes out like this:

 

Any guesses?

 

It's hair. Mrs. Cathead's hair, to be specific. Her hair color is nearly exactly the shades of dried Missouri prairie grass, and has all the natural complexity one could want in a scenery product. Here's how I used it.

 

I took some clumps leftover from the hairbrush (we save some of these anyway for use in deterring garden pests like mice). I twisted lengths of hair into tightly wounded bundles, then cut them off into short clumps that stick together naturally. 

I then spread scenic glue on a patch of landscape and began planting the clumps, teasing them apart a bit to create the naturally even clumpiness of prairie grass while still covering most of the landscape. To emphasize this point, too many scenery makers assume that natural grass grows uniformly, like a lawn, but prairie grasses especially grow in tight clumps with space around their base. That pattern is actually essential to the survival of a variety of native animal species, but that's a different discussion.

 

Here's a shot of one creek bank done, and of the broader area in various stages. The glue starts out white but dries clear.

 

And one more view of a completed area:

 

I really like the natural complexity in color and pattern this creates. It needs some bushes and woody growth to break up the pure grassiness, but it's a great start. I will be using static grass elsewhere in Rocheport, but wanted the creek banks to be especially wild and diverse in a way that static grass struggles to get right.

 

If you're wondering, I haven't poured the creek water yet because I want to do most broad-scale scenery work first, to minimize the chances of dripping glue or color onto the finished water surface.

 

I can give two other quick updates. One, here's the nearly finished bluff line on the east side, with mineral staining added. Here it's lit by a nice low-angle western sun. And the main Missouri River riverbank has had its scenic base layer of dirt and shredded leaves added, with the bluffs continuing on the backdrop downriver and the river itself having its base color added.

And two, I've started experimenting with various arrangements of building footprints for the town. I'm having to compress a lot of visual interest into a small area so there are various ways to use specific buildings to highlight aspects of the real town. I'm mostly going to use laser-cut wood kits for all of these, probably scratchbuilding a few simple structures. I don't feel the need to build all the buildings to match real ones; the keystone "real" structures for the location are the grain elevator / hay barn and the depot. The rest can simply create the right era and feel. Someday I can always go back and scratchbuild specific town buildings but I really don't see the need to put that much time into such things up front.

Hope my unorthodox scenery in this post wasn't too hair-raising. You can always comb through other build logs for more normal content.

 

Thanks for reading!

[wefalck]

A 'waste' well used! When I had a (blond) beard for a while, I used trimmings from it to represent the stubbs on a winter-field.

[Cathead]

2 minutes ago, wefalck said:

When I had a (blond) beard for a while, I used trimmings from it to represent the stubbs on a winter-field.

Sadly, my own hair is the wrong shade for scenic use. It's either too dark brown, or too white. My wife suggested I do a winter scene instead so I could use it. Ouch (I'm in my mid 40s, LOL).

[king derelict]

I cycled the Katy trail several times during my St. Louis years. Your scenery is very evocative and brings back happy memories.

alan

[Cathead]

King, that's great to hear! It's a special place, to be sure. So glad my work is giving you good memories.