Anyone built a really thick forest with lots of tall trees?

Paul - That sounds like a great scenic effect.  I have a somewhat similar project in that I want to have a heavily treed wall behind the curved stone arch bridge I am building.  I don't have a lot of room and will be very interested to see what responses you get.

 

Art

Sounds like a great idea.  It would be a significant investment of space, but you could end up with something unique and stunning.

 

Most layout "forests" are relegated to the background and most often are built with a curtain of good trees in the front and a blanket of ground foam behind them to simulate a continuous canopy of trees.  It sounds like you are picturing building the whole forest tree-by-tree (at least to a significant depth), with attention to the forest floor. That would produce a very different and superior result, I think.  I say "go for it."

Only in 1:1 scale.

When I was a cub scout we did mostly fir along an old Michigan Upper Penn. logging grade, sans-railroad, filling old logging & illegal harvest stump fields.

They are quite tall now.

I'm not sure it was forest exactly, more like patchy woods.

 

 

I have seen some impressive and envied model forests, maybe in Narrrow Gauge and Short Line Gazette, with its interest in logging, but would have to root to find the back issues. I would certainly like to incorporate something similar to that, with lots of tall blue spruce, and several interspersed fall aspen groves.

While stockpiling supplies for my On30 layout before the benchwork started, I bought the largest box of 'supertrees' you can get and I fully intend to plant them all, in a reasonably tight space, to represent a real forest. That, and I have hundreds of scale corn stalks ready to 'plant' as you rarely see dense trees or a good cornfield on most layouts.

take a look at the NWTL built by hikel layouts. Think they have about 10000 conifers plus.

 

http://hikeltrains.com/

 

 

I looked........

 

 

 

 

but couldn't see the forest for the trees.

 

Seriously though, I'm always searching for realistic methods of disguising tight curves or shielding them from view.  Thanks to the OP.

 

Bruce

Here is a fantastic scene with a forest backdrop. 

 

 

Is that real or a model? Sometimes you can't tell. While I'd love to make lots and lots of trees, it gets really expensive really fast.

That is real....but given the talents of many on this forum, one cannot always be sure.  

That's the CP's stoney creek bridge.

 

Bruce

 

I have used "Horse Hair" furnace filters, cut and glued together to form thick Western trees, dipped in paint, and sprinkled with foam if you with, make some dead trees with different paint dip and foam sprinkle or even burned trees, steak shish kabob sticks or dowels for trunks, these form forest background depth, then your more detailed trees in front. I have made lots of trees 18-24" doing this with all different shapes.

 

ncng

I've tried.  Basically whether you think I have succeeded depends on if you think my forest is "thick" enough.  I re-did is several times.  In my "mountain forest" area of the layout, below, there are over four hundred trees. It may not see like there are, but there are.  Trees vary from 2 inches to 11inches high.  I tried even taller ones, up to 16 inches high, and one 21 inch one, but they don't look as good in spite of being scale heights.

 

 The whole "forest area" is only a bit larger than what you see in photos below, about 7 by ten feet (the big outer loop on the left is all 72" curves), and it may not seem like there are four hundred there, but there are - a few more than that actually.  "Thick" in my mind would be at least eight hundred.  Problems with that are:

 

Cost - some of the bigger trees are JTT and such, quite good quality, and cost $12+ each, one or two cost over $20.  Some of the smaller ones came in packets and cost maybe $3 each.  Using $8 as an average, that is over $3,200 for this forest and $6,400 for one with twice as many trees.  Yes, I could make my own trees, and have . . . but I like good looking trees.  Flocked and painted sedum, home made trees made by any of several methods, look okay to me to use in the background.  But where I want trees in front of the loco and train, I need really good looking trees.  I like JTT best for that.  $$$$$$$

 

Hides the loco.  I played with the trees I have, putting them in thicker in a smaller part of the layout to see how cool it looks running my trains through them (see below).  At anything over about 1.5 times the density below, you (or at least I) could not see the train as well as I wanted.  You can hide too much of it.   

 

Overall I am satisfied with my "fores,t" but I would like about 250 more trees here.  The problem is that would cost a bit more than one or two Legacy or Premier steamers and there always seems to be at least one I want to buy!

 

Oh, and one pain in the butt thing.  I mount them by drilling a hole in the benchwork and sticking the truck down about 3/4 inch.  With 400 trees, though, there is always one or two that lean in their hole despite my having drilled it tight or whatever, or they get bent - and by the way working on this part of the layout means no matter how hard I try, I  bump into and bend a tree trunck or two even without trying.  So I spend a lot of time straightening out trees.  One or two leaning looks weird. (Look carefully below, you will see what I mean).

 

Still, when the super chief of that Mallet goes through there, it looks really cool.  

 

Lee; that is a very nice scene.

Yeah trees really make it or break it in a modeling environment.

Sometimes its better  not to have any,  until you find the right ones.

Commercial trees are expensive and some are just not large enough (6 to 8 inches), they look better in HO.

If you hand make them they just take some time. But the size can be more proportionate.

I would study prototype pictures to get the large tree effects.

 

 

 

You guys have done some good work.

 

I have recycled a few dozen village Christmas trees from my last layout; many of them I had pulled the bases off and inserted the wire base in previous foam mountain. I may go the same route. I am going to try to find a few dozen more. Here's a picture of my last layout that had a forest in the background (disregard the ugly guy in the foreground).

Cram them in on top of each other.

I added this tree line around the turntable.

We did a lot of Sedem foliage Mercer Junction Train Shop.

A burnt patch would be a realistic touch not seen often

 

Bark beetle.

 Yellowstone fire of 1988.  Bridger Teton Wilderness south of Yellowstone.  Pictures 2010

How big is a wilderness bear??

Note the claw marks by the flower. Long straight claws (4) indicates a Grizzly bear.

 

 

 

IN ANSWER TO THE POST ;sadly doing a realistic forest is not easy.

  While researching Rabbit Warren layouts, I came across one guys "other layout" a huge, and famous/respected (in England at least) HO layout with an incredible mountain full of trees. Take the denseness of Mike CT's tree line(nice) and put it on a 15²' mountain. I think it had 10's of thousands of trees(50,000-150,000?). 

 

Just to throw another forest related item out there. A rangers fire tower?

 

And Lee, crooked, leaning, broken trees are prototypical. Even in small patches. Ive seen a tornado lean 10 or so forest edge lining trees all near each other, all equally too. 

Yeah, it is prototypical, but it looks weird and so, as with many things on my layout, I "edit" prototypical accuracy.  A leaning tree looks out of place, like a missing tooth in the smile of a beautiful girl.

 

10,000 trees - I don't even want to think about getting caught up in so many.

I think the edges were done "normally", and the denser center trees stuck into "flower shop foam" in block sections(I forget the "real name") 

Korber models  705 fire tower.

Notes. 

(1.)Wilderness areas are maintained/policed by the US Forestry Service, part of the Dept of Agriculture. 

(2.) National Park Service is part of the Dept. of Interior.  All the National Parks and Historic sites are managed from the Dept. of Interior.

(3.) Third management system is BLM, Bureau of Land Management, for some reason the great dams on the Colorado River seem to be keyed to the BLM system.  Not sure where BLM fits in the big picture.  

(4.) Fires have always been a part of the western forest and for that matter even the eastern forest area.  Some say fire was/is an essential part of the eco-system.  Lodge pole pine cones only release their seeds when burned. 

(5.) Problem  We have suppressed fires for the last 80-100 years or so, with good intensions. The amount of fuel available has increased, along with climate change, warmer winters, bark beetle, draught, etc. The fires, once started, are more intense, larger burn areas. Note the pictures above, the grow back is very limited (22 years). Yellowstone fire 1988.  The intensity of the fire, incinerates the seeds, there is nothing to grow-back.

(6.) Some say the great western forest may be gone for ever. You can note the open meadows in a lot of my pictures.

(7.) An interesting part of your modeling would be the high meadows with the late July bloom, spectacular.

Paint brush, one of the few flowers that I know.

 Pictures are from Coulter Creek trail.  Coulter Creek trail is accessed from Whetstone Creek trail, off Pacific Creek trail, Pacific Creek Trail head, Bridger Teton Wilderness. Project was a (9) day trail maintenance/upgrade, July 2010. Elevation is 8,500+ft.

Dereck(left) and Eric (right), our US Forestry Service Rangers, Blackrock Ranger District. Work project is  (10) hr days, (9) days on, (6) days off before the next project.   Sadly, I need to add that Eric died of a fall, summer 2012, he was one of our supervisors the (4) times I did the Teton Wilderness adventure.

There are (100) pictures in this Facebook file.  Enjoy the Wilderness. Note the tools. We were not permitted to use power tools in a Wilderness area.  The cross cut saws were a project for most not acclimated to the higher altitude.

 Mike CT

  

Yeah I could use a LOT more trees myself. I have some Scenic express Super Trees. I have yet to populate them on the layout yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I used these woodland scenic trees found at a train show. They look ok for now.

 

 

What can really pull it off is if you can continue the trees into the backdrop effectively like this Modeler in HO has done:

 

 

J Daddy; your layout is looking fantastic.

Those pictures are spectacular.  However, I wonder if they are as convincing in real life. Continuing perspective views onto backdrops is a lot like using mirrors. It is a lot easier to get them to look good from a single viewing point than it is to do so for people moving around the room.

To that last point, I've been considering running my HV transmission lines into the backdrop only to realize that it would look correct only from one point of view. All the rest would be distorted to some degree... so is it worth it? The POV would probably be standing by the control panel, but it's a big railroad and people view it from all over the place. I may run them out to the layout edge and avoid the POV problem altogether.

One trick that often works well is to have the linear feature (road, power line...) disappear beyond a building or hillside and reappear on the backdrop.

Mike CT,

Lots of good photos and information!  It will be years however until I get to the point of foresting my yet to be started new layout.  I may try some on a small diorama, however.  

 

Yes, I have seen in person the sedum trees of Dave's Mercer Junction.  Very effective.

 

J Daddy,

thanks for,the photos of what you have done.  Very nice.

If a forest a large group of trees closely situated then can a forest be simulated as a series of vertical elements with a large elongated head of foliage. Where no individual tree is identifiable but rather the grouping itself is the forest?
Then how to simulate a forest group is the question.

I think the individual tips of pine keep it limited to individual placement. Even with the "raised terrain" of a blanket canopy, those individual vertical tips have to be set anyhow. Maybe use just those tips, trim the trunks to secure a raised surface of glued on tree tops. Like balls of leaves, no trunks, just color & texture patches? 

Making lots of trees, but only detailing the tops thickly, would speed things. Linear viewing towards the horizon would make it better. Packed tight enough I don't think you would see it. 

There was an article in Model Railroader, I believe, several years ago.  (I'm not very proficient at retrieving...just recalling!)  It dealt with this same question.

 

As I recall, the solution concept was to create a dense front buffer zone of detailed trees/brush that defined the forest composition.  Behind this buffer you would erect a floating layer of hardware cloth or chicken wire (blackened) on some pegs.  Then you would populate the wire cloth/screen with foliage material, short lengths of bottlebrush trees, etc., to simulate the tops of the forest receding into the distance.  The foliage 'balls' (deciduous) and 'spikes' (conifer) would decrease in size towards the rear to give a forced perspective of depth.  It played especially well on a sloped terrain, I recall. 

 

I haven't done this myself, but I've seen a variation of it done on an HO layout many years ago during a convention tour of layouts in the Midwest.  It was quite effective.

 

Anyhow, it meant less fabrication/purchase of full trees for forestation...useful goal, indeed.

 

FWIW, always...

 

KD

Yes they are called " Puff Ball" trees. In smaller scales I have seen tooth picks to model the trunks and the canopy is made screen topped with foliage or Puff balls of painted cotton covered with foam.

 

 

 

 

 

Nice Job on the above!

 

I put taller trees on hills around the track for more height.  Some of the older trees are faded and need to be redone.  I will add more trees now that I'm retired.

 

i started last year to make a bunch of Western fir trees for my depiction of the Oregon blues ranging in size from 18 to 24''. A few bunched together look great and a field of them would be awesome. I got about a dozen or so close to finished to get to know the process in building them.The hard part was grinding the 1/4 and 3/8 " dowels to a point from a foot down the dowel  and then drawing them over some sharp nails to scrape in the bark structure. They are a lot of work and think it be a lot cheaper to have someone in China to make the few 100 I wanted. Maybe I am going to do a desert scene.