Building the Creek

On the Duncan's Mills side of my micro-layout I wanted the tracks to run over a little creek. The bridge is to be concrete arch. Really more of a big culvert than a bridge.

The track was laid over the 1/2" gatorfoam sub-roadbed and ballasted.  The creek bed was roughed in with pieces of foam. The two sides of the arch were made out of a sheet of 1/4" balsa.  The balsa was painted a concrete gray and weathered with an ink wash.  A cap of 3/8" balsa was added.  There actually is no bottom to the arch but since the viewpoint is restricted to head on it is hard to see this. I carefully trimmed the sides of the subroadbed so that arch would fit. I cut slots in the foam scenery of the creek for the balsa side to slot in to and then glued the balsa pieces in place.  The sides of the creek were coated with light-weight spackle to blend in the arch.  I embedded a some real rocks in the spackling and added a layer of gravel to form the creek bed.  The creek was painted with daubs of grays and browns of craft store paint when the spackle was dry. Some sand was used to fill in the spaces between the rocks.  After the paint dried over night I saturated the whole creek bed in dilute matte medium to glue everything together.  To make the water I used gloss medium with a tiny amount of green paint mixed in. Over several days I built the gloss medium up to form several layers to give it some thickness.

To finish the scene I painted the backdrop to show a river valley for the creek receding in to the distance. I added a few bushes and some grass and then finally planted some fir trees from Canyon Scenics.  The effect of the creek and trees is to make it feel like the railroad disappears off the scene and really does a nice job of making the 12" tail track seem a lot bigger.

The completed creek scene.

The creek scene from above to show how it is constructed.