Building Model Railway Trains and Scenery

The best part of building a model railroad is adding all sorts of scenery along the track. We all get bored with the annual task of setting up the model train set at Christmas time, to give the Christmas tree a few extra bells and whistles, and then packing it all away again until next year when the festive season is over – why not put a little extra effort into your model railway and create something that you will want to keep around a little more permanently.

The foundation of your railroad is the benchwork. If you want to build your own benchwork you can, but you can also choose to buy it ready-made. If you want to buy your own benchwork kit, deciding to do so will come with many advantages. You can cut out all the steps that come with benchwork cutting and drilling for starters if you buy yourself a ready-made kit. A bought kit is also much more functional, and easier to move around if you want to take your model railway to shows, or transfer it to different areas of the house to have it on show.

Building your own benchwork is a more complicated and time consuming task. You firstly need to create a design for the layout of your benchwork – and plot out how you want it to look, and the types of functions it should have. How big do you want your benchwork to be? Will you likely want to add to your benchwork later on in the piece? And what type of shape do you want for the top of your model railway benchwork? This will affect your benchwork – a round benchwork top and a rectangular table requires different types of benchwork. You need to make sure, no matter what, that your benchwork is solid and can hold a decent amount of weight. You can expect that a decent benchwork platform is 3/8 of an inch thick and is made of plywood. You can also expect that the legs of the table are about 28 inches – and able to be altered to meet your design specifications. You need to consider whether or not you require your benchwork to be portable – so that you can move it around easily. If you do need it to be portable you will need to slice your plywood into several different sized pieces before you begin building your benchwork.

The real key to making the scenery in your model railroad stand out is to ensure that it looks realistic – basically a to-scale miniature model of the real thing. You may need to use scenery levels to make the scenery appear larger than it really is – and therefore more realistic. You can level your scenery by using little tricks such as placing large trees in the foreground and mountains and smaller trees in the background to create scale. You also need to think about the type of train you are running on your railroad track – for example – a logging train would likely travel through mountainous and tree-lined areas. You may even wish to have your logging train pass a saw mill or even a lumberyard.

You can increase the appeal of your scenery by adding things like grassy knolls, fields, mountains, rocks and bridges – these will also help to make your scenery seem more realistic. You then need to make sure your scenery has more signs of life too, so you might like to add phone booths, ponds, children’s play equipment, flowers and hedges – all of the things you will likely see in a real neighborhood running along the railway track.

Model trains are artistic masterpieces and are a great way to show off your artistic talents. You can amaze your friends with your talent in putting together classy and scenery-filled model railroads.