Making tunnel portals and retaining walls

Scenic Express has a large selection of retaining walls and tunnel portals. 

Better than reinventing the wheel.

Hopefully they will have what you need.

Good railroading

mikeg

You can etch or hot knife into foam board and plaster and paint them. Dimensions can be found or asked for if you need them. Cardboard w/scenic express embossed stone paper can be used also with great success. I am sure many suggestions will follow so deal with this to your comfort to create and expense level.

 I built all my retaining walls myself.  I even learned to use molds and cast my own.  It was a commitment in time, but ultimately a little cheaper than buying the premade stuff.  Some retaining walls are easy.  In the photo below, the retaining wall between the tracks and the city was made with strips of pvc foam board, railings from an ho scale highway overpass kit, and a coat of tan textured spray paint.  

It all depends on your vision for your own layout.  What would you like to do?

nick

Forest

    You could try this.

  I made molds with latex for stone walls and matching portals. They take a while to create but pay off with the ability to reuse. India ink in alcohol is the base color.

     Another wall I made was to use the foam board with paper on the outside. I peeled one layer off and used a concrete paint with ink for weathering.

Ray, those look awesome.  I did the same sort of thing in urethane.  Here's a wall i cast before it was intstalled on the layout.

All of these walls are carved and painted pink foam:

Here, I needed to match a Lionel portal:

This one is a scribed sheet of balsa wood with applied strips:

Some of the latex rock molds will do decent detail.

Forum Sponsor Scenic Express deserves a look.    A lot there. Click on Scenic Express for a direct link.   Tunnels and walls.

You can also do tunnel liners to enhance the portal.  MTH Portal.  Tunnel liner mold is Woodlands Scenic,  HO modifed.

Another solution to retaining walls and their sometimes "wedding-cake" layout appearance might be called "non-retaining wall retaining walls".  In the photo below, the City of "Reno" sits on elevated Pylons made of routed pine strips joined by a footer and header and plywood faced with steel beams cut from Atlas HO steel girder bridges, in this case arranged along what would otherwise have been an eight foot Wedding Cake Step.  Keeps things open and airy.  Easy to do and if you don't have a router, square pylons will do.  Not only did it open everything up visually, but it afforded us an extra track under the station.  For more examples see our Dunham Studios website.

Clarke Dunham

President

Railroads On Parade

Dunham Studios, Inc.

clarke@dunhamstudios.com

www.modeltrains.pro

www.DunhamStudios.com

www.RailroadsOnParade.com

Ray..I like those walls....have used a lot of commercial ones for stone walled buildings,

but they are $12.00 each, which means, for some taking six or eight of those walls, a

cheaper source would be welcome.  While I see the molds, the hard and time consuming

part is suspected to be the making of the masters for the molds?  Have an easy way to

do that?

I don't think there is an easy or quick way to do the molds. Having made over 100 castings, the time and plaster cost are a fraction of the purchase price of buying that many. The last mold made is much better than the first as some improvements were added. The time element is a problem because each thin layer of latex must have 24 hours to dry. It must be thin and you must wait. However we are still using the molds

Ray Marion

There are U-Tube videos on the subject to.  Do a search on building/making retaining walls.  Ed Powers