INSTALL A CONCRETE RETAINING WALL

Do you have any tips for creating a modern concrete retaining wall? Most off-the-shelf products seem to be for brick or stone walls.

Patrick Reynolds, by email

Peter says: On my ‘Lockdown Layout’ (MR282), I needed to build a retaining wall along one side of the goods yard, with a road sitting on the upper level. Luckily, a few days before starting the project, I obtained one of the new 3D cardboard embossed sheets from Noch, which fits the bill perfectly.

These new sheets cost less than £2 each and measure 250mm by 125mm. There’s a choice of brick, stone or concrete exterior textures. I chose pack No. 56669, which features a typically grimy concrete outlook, complete with graffiti, so typical of a contemporary urban scene. It could be used to form the interior or exterior of an industrial building, as well as a retaining wall or underpass.

These sheets are extremely useful for all manner of walls, roofs or even pavements, and can be easily cut with a pair of scissors or a craft knife. A real bonus of these sheets is the grid patterns and various shapes and profiles printed onto the rear, making it easy to create a range of structure elements such as tunnel portals for a variety of scales.

I cut the sheet to the required size and then glued it to a piece of mounting card to add extra strength, with a further piece of mounting card cut to form the capping at the upper edge. Once the wall was fitted to the landform, it was simply a case of adding the scenic elements around it.

Concrete retaining walls are now a common sight in railway and urban settings. They can now be modelled easily, thanks to some new pre-printed building sheets from Noch.