Trains @ Station Studios

With a design in mind, I started by painting the backdrop. I did this before putting in the basic foreground scenery structure because the foreground would make it difficult to paint the distant hills.

I followed the approach outlined in Dave Frary’s “Realistic Model Railroad Scenery” book. First I painted the sky; then I added a line of distant trees. I used cheap flat acrylic paints picked up at the local Michael’s arts and craft store and used a simple foam brush for both:

Here’s a picture of the module with these two areas painted in:

The cardboard mockups are standing in for the station/warehouse building at the dock and the water tank. I then added a second line of distant trees on top of the first line. This second line of trees was a slightly more intense green that the first. I also used a little spray of flat white enamel at this point to increase the illusion of distance.

Finally, I switched to a bristle brush and followed the Hales’ method of painting trees as described in recent issues of Railroad Model Craftsman: you just get a little bit of paint on the end of the bristle brush and just daub it onto the backdrop. This works very well for recreating Ontario forests. I squeezed out several shades of green onto my palette (a margarine tub lid) and then mixed different shades for blotting. I finally went back with a fine brush and some grey / white / black paint and painted on some tree trucks. There are a fair number of white birch trees in this area and I wanted to capture them on the backdrop.

I’m pretty pleased about how the backdrop turned out. It looks great without a lot of work. Here’s the east end of the module:

Unfortunately, I did not match the colours of the backdrop to the ground foam I was using and later on had to go back and repaint the trees. I strongly recommend purchasing your ground foam early and matching the backdrop colours to it.

Before I started slinging paint and plaster around, I wanted to cover the basic open grid benchwork with a layer of foam. After looking around, I decided to break open the piggybank and buy some of Woodland Scenics 1/4″ and 1/2″ foam sheets. These things are expensive but I felt it was necessary to use such thin sheets to help keep the roadbed looking like it was put on top of the ground. I used 1/2″ foam on the north side of the track and 1/4″ on the south side to create the feeling that the ground slopes from the north to south.

At this point, it became very clear that I really didn’t have a clue on what to do next. Like many other things, designing scenery from a photograph is much easier to get right than trying to make things up in your head. So I started searching around for photographs that I could use as a basis for the scenery design for the dock module. I don’t have any pictures of the Key Valley Railway around its dock, so I turned to another railway in the area that has a lot more photographic documentation: the Huntsville and Lake of Bays Railway. I found a picture of the H&LoBRwy. docks at North Portage in the 1920’s which showed a panoramic view of the area that matched the vantage point of my dock module. Working from the photograph made it much easier to design the basic scenery structure, in particular, setting the horizon and determining how much of distant hills should be visible.

Editor’s Note: In 2005, I exchanged some emails with Dave Robinson who provided the following photograph which if I had in 2001 would have substantially changed the design of the Dock Module: