Basic scenery shapes were formed with two inch insulating foam cut with a handheld drywall saw to create rough shapes. Messy, keep a shop-vac handy. I covered them with a Scluptomold mix, now often described as “Scenery Goop”. Not that I have anything to do with its current widespread use, but I have been using this since I was 12 years old. The owner of my local hobby shop recommended it for model armor dioramas and I thought it would be useful for model railroad scenery. At the time plaster and zip texturing was the conventional wisdom for layout scenery.
The tunnel portal has the classic or cliche train layout look of protruding rocks surrounding the opening. In this case it is the prototype. The Patapsco River flows east to the Baltimore harbor and hits this granite hill, then turns south, and goes around it leaving exposed rock and barely enough soil to support some trees. The railroad followed the river until early 1900s realignment and the tunnel bore through the hill. To model this steep cliff face I used a variety of Woodland Scenics molds to cast sharp rock outcroppings to simulate the location. I tried to place them similar to the prototype and filled the area in between with goop, Woodland Scenics clumps, and parts of Scenery Express trees. The tunnel portal is a commercial product by XXX that replicates the brick tunnel portals the B&O at several places along the Old Main Line (OML). It is a hydrocal casting that I stained with box store acrylic paints thinned with isopropyl alcohol.
Tunnel photo
Vegetation along the right of way is something I get to study almost every day. I live about 15 miles from the B&O’s Old Main Line and much closer to the PRR’s old Northern Central Railway line. They were constructed within a few years of each other, each following a river. One is still an active rail line, the other is a rail trail that starts 600 feet from my house. I try to walk 3 miles every day and I often ride my bicycle on the trail much further. Having worked on and more recently walked portions of the Old Main Line, I can attest that the vegetation is very similar.
The steep bank to the right in the photo looks like it is covered with Woodlands Scenics ground foam. I see this everyday on the NCR Trail. It seems like a cop out to not use some new technique for scenery, but ground foam with some variations in size and color, along with some smaller trees actually seems to replicate this right of way well. Like the NCR right of way, the OML has large granite outcroppings. The are dark grey with lighter edges and often tinted green with moss and other organic coverings.
B&O Modeling 