Mountain Building Rookie Questions

You could coat it with some setting type joint compound (Durabond 90) brush a thick coat on.Many guys add rock molds after that but I just sculpt my own with a trowel then paint in some way.Nick

Add some sparkle or joint compound. After its all dry, and you paint or color, add in some ground cover or what-have-you, add trees. There is a small point that sticks into the base, you can poke that into your mountain. Use a bit of hot glue to help hold it up. That's how I did mine. A few are currently just placed, not glued yet (the crooked one on the top). If you are up close, you can see some cracks in the joint compound, but I am up on the table a lot, so some of that movement may have caused them.

Yours is coming along just fine.  I found out by experience on my mountains they never look good enough to the builder until you keep adding the items you want in your mountain.  I started back in the 70’s building my first mountain with the cardboard web method and then adding a layer of brown paper bags cut into 4-6 inch squares dipped in Hydrocal.  Came out looking like %&*#.  Then I knew I wanted rock faces on it so I went over in the back yard and got a nice big 21 inch diameter log and pressed heavy duty 6 inch squares of tin foil into it for a rock mold and folded the 4 edges up ½ inch and filled that with Hydrocal.  As it started to set I put it on the mountain face and kept doing that overlapping each section as the one on the face started to harden up.  I was very pleased with my efforts only after I did the paint job and added trees, grass, weeds and buildings.

For my second mountain with the trestle built into it I did basically the same method with the cardboard web and then the paper strips but then I bought something new out there called Woodland Scenics Rock Molds.  Using the same Hydrocal I did the same method.

Get the book “How to build realistic model Railroad Scenery” by David Frary.  You will be amazed the amount of information this man has.  I have always used it as my Scenery bible.

First picture is the log mold scenery mountain and Second pic is the rock mold scenery with the trestle.  The third pic is another large mountain 12 feet long about 6 ft from the floor and it is only trees.  This was harder than using the rock molds on the whole thing.  It is basically the cardboard web with 34 blue Styrofoam glued to it so I could plant all the natural trees in it.  No store bought trees were used in this area.  In fact there are probably only 2 dozen store bought trees on the whole layout.  Everything is picked from the woods and fields.

Your mountain is looking good, keep plugging away at it.  Trees are my favorite addition to any Eastern mountain.  Lot of them as shown in pic number 3