(Moderator: I wasn't sure where to post this, so if move it if you deem it necessary). Layout building and construction can be much cheaper than we assume. The best visual layout I have seen in the greater city of Vancouver, BC is also one of the cheapest built in Vancouver as well. I am going to suggest some methods that will keep the price of scenery, construction, and structure building down, yet yielding even better results than store bought goodies. Most of us come into the hobby insecure. We don't know what we are doing so we copy what everyone else is doing; it seems to work for them. But the best I have seen has also been the cheapest, interestingly enough. Below are some ideas and I hope you can add to them: 1) Some of the best ground dirt I have seen, and am using myself is river silt. I saw this on my buddies layout. He went to an area on the Fraser River in Surrey BC and got buckets of river silt. He then put them through various sieves until it was very fine. Painting the area with combination of water and white glue, he sifted his filtered river silt on and let it dry. Since it is the real thing, his ground dirt looks very "real." 2) Track ballast - my same buddy use to work for CN as a engine maintance manager. He "borrowed" about a half a bag of engine sand, for "sanding" the tracks and used this same sand for ballast on his HO layout. What I was planning on doing was purchasing some sand, and again sifting it to get a finer grade of sand, then use this as ballast on my N scale track. 3) I made a cheap water tower, a smaller one, using one of those brown plastic pill bottles you get your prescription drugs in. I bought some auto body putty and rounded the top of one end of the pill bottle, and sanded it down to give a rounded top. I then closed in the bottom and added legs. You can make a variety of things using pill bottles; they come in so many different sizes. 4) Search construction sites for discarded foam used in insulation. You don't need large pieces as you can hot glue pieces together to help build mountains. 5) Make your own "plaster gauze" by using cheese cloth. What I do is the usual webbed strips to form mountains. Once this is done, I get a hot glue and hot glue the perimeter of cheese cloth to the web strips. After the perimeter is glued (I pull on the cheese cloth to tighten it up), I then put a dap about every 4 inches to ensure the cheese cloth doesn't move around for my next step. I then "paint" the cheese cloth with hydrocal or plaster. 6) Learn scratch building following the plans from an MR or other magazine. You will be pleasantly surprised at how easy scratch building can be. The only thing holding most potential scratcher builders back is "fear of failure." If your master piece is a failure, don't show it to any one and try another. I promise you after your second attempt, you will get very good quickly. 7) Check out the dollar store tools and glues section. Almost all the super glue I use is from the dollar store. So what if it dries up, another dollar and I'm good to go. Use Zip Kicker or the like to speed up super glue drying. 8) It is a myth that you need material to deaden the sound of engines on a layout. Three of my friends don't use anything to deaden sound; they built their track write on the plywood. There is no noise problem. 9) Cheap spline method (spline is a method of track road bed building and is normally on the expensive side) = use hard board cut into one inch strips. Make small rectangular blocks about 1 1/2 wide and about 3 inches long. Cut two slits in the blocks, wide enough to hold a strip of hard board. But the slits about 2/3 of an inch in from the end of the block. Then on top of this hard board tracks that you have created, add hard board cut about three inches wide (this is called the hollow core method of spline construction). 10) Buy only quality track, but purchase almost all of it used. I can get Peco turnouts for 1/3 their new cost and in my books, so what if one of them is bad, if that only happens occassionally. Guys switching scales, estate sales, train shows, guys selling off goodies due to a down turn in their economic status are all good sources of used track. 11) Buy white glue by the gallon, you'll only thank me. 12) When purchasing "bus wire" for your DCC, household wire is great. Use a knife and strip out the wire from its wrapping.
Rick, you bring back memories of a half century ago, when Boy's Life published for Boy Scouts used to have an occxasional article about model railroading "on the cheap". Everyone in our troop had a layout, and I recall building a signal out of a tongue depressor, thumbtacks and I can't remember what else from a Boy's Life article. We made trees from goldenrod harvested in the winter, dyeing the sawdust left over from benchwork construction green and gluing it to the goldenrod. The parakeet or canary didn't poop everywhere in the bird gravel spilled on the bottom of the cage, so some of that was salvaged for ballast. You bring back old times.......
And let's not forget baby's breath for shrubs, eh? Yeah, Boys Life. One of our leaders had a great layout and a machine shop where I converted my old Marx O gauge into a "Lionel" by installing classification lights and a whistle fabbed in the shop. Even painted the tires white. Sure wish I still had that "one of a kind".
