Make white water
Chris Leigh makes a Scottish stream with a waterfall.
Chris Leigh makes a Scottish stream with a waterfall.
Most people, it seems, are attracted to or fascinated by water. It seems that, as an island race, there are few of us who don’t have some affinity with it.
When we were allocating the jobs for this issue of Model Rail, I already had an idea for a project. However, I have a lot of models which I’ve enjoyed building for magazine features but for which I had no real need. Many of them now gather dust on shelves around my house. As I’ve pointed out in my column on page 15, I wanted to have another crack at modelling white water but it had to be built for use on my layout and not consigned to already over-crowded shelf space.
If I built a hill and a tunnel over one end of my layout, to replace the existing, rather tired, airfield scene, I could have a mountain stream tumbling down the hillside. If I gave the whole thing a Scottish look, I could also use the standing stones and castle, which I had built without any idea of where I might use them. Many professional gardeners will tell you that a water feature is essential. I believe that is true of model railways, too, and I’ve used a few different methods of creating water on layouts.
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
As a kid, my layout had a pond made from a piece of broken glass with green-painted putty around the sharp edges – hardly something I’d suggest these days! There’s no doubt, however, that the very reflective surface of glass does make for a good-looking flat pond. I also built bridges over the goldfish pond and posed Kitmaster models on them. As they usually ended up in the
water, this particular modelling effort was restricted to plastic kits!
One thing that does not usually work well in model form is real water. Real water pouring over an 80mm high model waterfall is not going to roar, crash and spray in the way that it would over a 20ft drop. However, I did use real water with a degree of success for Egham club’s ‘HO’ Canadian layout on which a barge loaded with freight cars moves back and forth across the lake. In that situation the water had to move around the barge, but for most model railway purposes the water simply needs to be static, as in a photograph. Unless we have a Faller road system, it is likely that the only things on our layout that move will be the trains. Figures, vehicles and rivers and streams tend to be stationary as they would be in a photograph. Creating white water – fast-moving water churned up by rocks and waterfalls – is best done to look good in a photograph. I had taken this approach with the beach scene on ‘Polwyddelan’, my Cornish harbour layout, which has quite a lot of ‘water’ including Atlantic breakers rolling onto the beach. In the 1980s much use was made of two-part clear casting resin to represent water. Its high gloss certainly worked well for making model water, but there were real issues with it. The very strong smell given off while it was curing was seldom acceptable indoors, it was unlikely to cure in low temperatures and while still liquid it was capable of finding its way off the layout through the tiniest hole or crack in the scenic base.
In more recent years the model scenery manufacturers have come up with a variety of ways to model water using materials that are easier to control, easier to work with, and that don’t give off strong fumes. My preference is to use these, together with lots of coats of a good quality gloss varnish.
Wherever it is in the world, moving water tends to behave in the same way, so I used a number of my holiday snaps from Canada as a guide for this project. However, while one waterfall is much like another, the water above and below the fall can look very different. My Scottish stream needed to have the brownish colouring of water flowing over peat moors, rather than the icy blue-green of melt-water which predominates in Western Canada.