Making Mountains out of Newspapers

The risers are in place, and now we can move on to the fun stuff. Creating mountains! The first step was applying profile boards along the edges of the layout. To cut these, I bought a Woodland Scenics Foam cutter. This uses a wire to quickly cut through foam, and since the foam included in the kit is made to work with the cutter, no harmful fumes are released while you are cutting. The only other tool that I had to buy that wasn't included in the kit was a low temp glue gun and glue sticks.

You can see the profile boards in place here, after placing flat foam areas wehre houses will go and the sides of the tunnels, it's just a matter of building up the contours. A liberal supply of masking tape keeps all of the newpaper balls in place.


This angle shows just how these balls of newspapers are used to create the undulating mountain texture. To create the 4'x8' layout required about 10 Sunday newspapers.

On to Scenery Building

I decided to try out Woodland Scenics' Subterrain system. I don't have the carpentry skills required for L-girder construction, didn't want the mess of carving out pink foam, and wanted something more sophisticated than a plain 4x8 sheet of plywood with green flock grass. Also, I knew that I wanted to carry their products, and by building a layout from the ground up with it, I can help customers with pitfalls to avoid and things that worked well for me.

Since I was also working on getting our internet train store up and running at the same time, I decided to use a kit so that I wouldn't need to spend time on creating a track plan figuring out grades and ordering individual pieces. By using the Grand Valley Lightweight Layout Kit, I was able to get everything that I would need to construct the scenery in one package.

Step 1 of construction is gluing down the risers that the track will rest on. The beauty of using these risers is that your scenery can be below track level or above it. This gives some of the flexibility that you normally get with an L-Girder system, very quickly and easily. In total I spent about an hour laying out the risers, and getting everything glued.

The other nice thing about the Woodland Scenics kit is that I saved over $250 vs. buying the pieces separately. We're selling the kit for $380.97 to members which is less than I've found anywhere else on the Internet.

Building a new 4 x 8' layout.

Trains, I love them. I've wanted to build a permanent pike for the last 25 years or so, so when I opened up SPTrains.com, I took the plunge and devoted a 4' x 8' area of the store to an HO Layout. The first step in the process was to create a layout table. I used 10) 2 x4 x 8' and cut one of them in half this allowed me to run 3 of the 2 x 4' s along the full length, and then the 2) 2x4x4' pieces on the two sides.

I cut the rest of the 2 x 4's in half and ran cross braces every two feet, so I ended up with a grid that looked like

+----+----+----+----+
|    |    |    |    |
+----+----+----+----+
|    |    |    |    |
+----+----+----+----+

Each open area is 2'x2' so there is plenty of support for the lightweight scenery shell. The remaining 2x4's I cut to 40" long and put 2 of them together to create a 4 x 4 post, anchoring these to each side to create legs. I chose a 40" height because it works well with a stool, and keeps the trains out of reach of young children, while providing a great viewing height for standing as well.

I used 1/2" MDF for the top and for a shelf that I use for controls and electrical elements.


Here is how the table turned out sitting in a corner of the store.
I added casters on the bottoms of the legs so that I can move it around easily.