Modelling snow

10061 Views 12 Replies 11 Participants Last post by kiwionrails, Jan 20, 2013

goedel

Discussion Starter · Dec 11, 2007 (Edited by Moderator)

www.bahnbilder.de

Modelling Snow

Hello all,

Snow is a significant form of precipitation on any Alpine railway and so as a modeller of the Austrian and Swiss national railways then I would love to have a section of my layout representing winter.

Has anyone tried modelling snow and can they recommend a technique? Have they seen it really well done on an exhibition layout anywhere, or on someones website?

One advantage of snow is that it covers everything uniformly so once you find a convincing way of doing it then modelling a large area of wintery terrain becomes quite simple - just place all the trees, cars, black paint for paint roads, houses, streetlamps and anything else you want to see poking out of the snow...and then blanket the whole lot by your preferred method!

Which brings me back to the tricky bit, the so-called preferred method? A search of google yielded some options mainly from model wargaming websites, which I have virtually copied and pasted to here:

1. Silicate-based "snow" flock by Woodland Scenics etc. designed for model railways.

2. White "Celluclay". If you want a dusting of snow you can use your usual ground cover methods and then, after a soaking of dilluted white glue or acrylic modeling medium, sprinkle on some "marble dust." IMHO, is the best small scale representation of snow.

3. Paint the ground white, then cover in a grey flock, and drybrush white. This is simple but crude.

4. Durhams water putty. Powder mixes with water and dries rock hard. Mix and apply to base. Sculpt snow drifts etc.. at this time. When dry, paint white.

5. Games Workshop employees use fine sugar-substitutes. Sprinkle on and use PVA glue to hold in place.

6. The best method is finely ground marble dust and it can be bought in bags from model railway suppliers. It even sparkles!

7. Pre-mixed tile grout. It dries snow white in no time, and looks like snow.

Hmmm. Plenty of ways of doing it then! But which will work best in N scale or H0 scale? The marble dust sounds particularly good...?

Being a terrible humbug* (

) I'm not trying to model Christmas here, just an ordinary winter day/night with freshly fallen snow (i.e. not very dirty!!) so it will probably be fairly mountainous terrain or a forest etc. between two tunnels in a mountain valley.

*What a festive topic this is, ho ho ho!

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goedel

Discussion Starter · #4 · Dec 11, 2007

QUOTE (mikelhh @ 11 Dec 2007, 12:34) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>I too intend to model snow on my US layout, and have done a fair bit of research on the topic. I've been advised that marble dust is not the sort of stuff you want to be inhaling.
That is like plaster or any fine powder I suppose. That it can get into your lungs means that it can get into mechanisms so I suppose marble dust should be glued down in some way and then attacked with a vacuum cleaner to remove any lose material, before a face mask is taken off - let alone a train run!

QUOTE I intend to go with Woodland Scenics snow which apparently will look a bit grubby before too long and will need refreshing. If it gets dirty I'll vacuum it up. Unfortunately that'll get a bit costly, but I do like the idea of having fresh snowfall in different places from time to time. I don't want a heavy snowfall, so I doubt I'll be using putty or plaster, although experiments suggest that dry plaster powder looks pretty good when scattered around.
It is interesting that you are intending to use 'loose' snow, I suppose this is more practical in larger scales when you can get away with larger and safer particle sizes.

Thanks for the inspiring pictures too, they certainly do hint at the potential of your method!

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