March 18th, 2010
Fans of model trains know that the secret to your home railroad collection is high quality model train scenery. Enthusiasts, collectors, and hobbyists would probably all agree that at the heart of this pastime, designing and constructing the intimate and intricate landscape that surrounds your railroad tracks is truly a joy. Not only does this detailed hobby allow you to analyze and organize the world around you on a miniature stage, but it forces you to reach into the heart of your imagination too. You get to choose if you want your railroad to travel through a realistic scale model of your home town, a mountainous region of Bavaria, or a fantastical far away planet, and you can make your own models in the process.
If you find this particular task difficult or daunting, there are many retailers both on and off line who can supply you with everything you need to make the perfect model train set.
Perhaps the first thing you need to think about when designing your environment is how many scenes you want to develop. Keeping in mind that the human eye can only process one scene at a time you should develop separate scenes that are joined by less detailed miles of track.
This means that you will not only need enough pieces to establish your multiple settings, but other minor accessories to fit in between the scenes. This could be trees to follow a long stretch between two rural areas or a small patch of mountainside that connects a small country ranch with a nearby town.
These can be very simple things, like a lake with some deer, or a glen of trees near a modest hillside. If you do this properly, everything will flow together smoothly and you will not be overwhelmed by an overabundance of intrusive detail.
Of course, you will want to place trees, shrubs, bushes, mountains, hills, and bodies of water to lend to the realism of your landscape, but you should also have buildings of different kinds too.
Many designers intentionally put small buildings behind larger ones to create the illusion of perspective. Flat terrain gets boring after a while, and honestly, there are not many stretches of land along railroads that are without some kind of differentiation. Not only will you find the many levels more enjoyable in an aesthetic way, but it will give your model railroad more life and realism, which should be the point in the first place.
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