The Middletown Scene - Route 9 Terrain

Towards the end of the last post, you saw that the Airline bridge had been "terrain-ed in" (to coin a phrase), but that was getting a little ahead of ourselves... Follow along in the captions for the process I used for the terrain around Route 9 (and the Airline bridge) - as you'll see, I use a variety of techniques depending on what's needed.

The foam board base had been here for YEARS, acting mostly as a shelf for tools and such, but it provided the foundation for Route 9 itself - which was made up from foam core (foam core posterboard with the paper peeled off makes for great concrete road texture).

We can't avoid at least a little compromise when it comes to scaling things down from the prototype - and, unfortunately, and the distance from the Airline bridge to the Washington Street intersection had to be severely compressed, resulting in an unprototypical hill/grade. But it at least conveys the sense of the area I'm modeling - it's impressionistic - and would you have noticed if I hadn't pointed it out?

The area "south" of Washington Street to Sumner Creek is totally open here and will get the cardboard lattice treatment.

This is a good view of the two major methods I use to cover & fill in terrain - it's typically some combo of foam board/scraps and cardboard lattice.

The cardboard lattice technique is pretty easy and straightforward - just hot glue (or even staple) vertical strips...

... and "basketweave" horizontal strips. It's incredibly versatile and can be squished and manipulated to get the rough contour you're looking for.

It's an especially effective and easy technique for quickly covering large, open areas. How would you go about covering this with foam board?

It's super easy and quick with the cardboard lattice.

Unlike foam though, it does require the extra step of adding plaster-impregnated gauze (or plaster-soaked paper towels, which are way too messy IMO).

Back to the Airline bridge area, I used more cardboard - and my foam core wing wall templates - to rough in the terrain around the abutment. There's no "right" way to do this - just keep gluing strips in as supports for the plaster cloth & Sculptamold/ground goop layers (so be sure to allow for those).

Plaster cloth layer applied

Ground goop layer applied

As you can see, the "terrain-ing" (aka "terraforming") stage goes very quickly and provides a HUGE bang for the time, vastly improving the overall look. The next step will be to start adding color and texture in the form of ground foams, grasses, bushes, etc.

But that will come a bit later. One of the perks of having a large-ish layout is that there's always something different you can do, depending on your mood. Not ready to start adding ground cover yet? How about we do something with Washington Street?

Next time we'll try to make some Walther's city streets a bit more realistic . . .