Model Railroad Signs Construction

One way to spice up your model railroad is to include lots of "pop art" or signs that you would typically see in every day life. In fact, even if you are working within a specific era such as the 1950s or 60s this can work very well too!

But how do you get the images for your billboards, road signs, movie advertisement posters and in-store signs? Simple, you Google it!

Let's say that you want to include retro movie posters to a store front. There are many vintage movie sites that feature the original movie posters on their pages. Typically these images are high quality and quite large, which is really what you want to look for. You ideally want to find pictures that have great resolution and are very big when you click on them with your magnifier tool in your web browser.

You can save these images to your desktop, and then pull up your printing software. This program should allow you to re-scale them, or you can do so in Microsoft Paint and then save the picture with the new size.

If you need help with printing sizes and what types of photo paper to use, don't be afraid to take a CD-R with your images to a local photo print service. They really know their stuff, and if you explain to them what you are trying to achieve it will probably help them picture how to give you the best result, plus -- who knows? one of them might be a fellow railroad enthusiast too!

Now, I've known to do this for a while now, but I learned a trick to printing on window glazing from a Gateway NMRA article that you should check out!

Making Model Railroad Pine Trees

You rarely see a model railroad layout that doesn't have trees in the mix. Even an industrial type setting can have some plant life that fits in with the buildings. For a lot of beginner railroaders, the vision of an HO happily flowing through tunnels and interweaving between tall pines is an ideal picture, but just how exactly do you make trees if you don't want to buy all of them. This is how!

You can certainly buy model train trees and shrubs at many hobby stores or even online, and they aren't expensive, but many people who share this passion like to hand craft as many of the details as possible, so here are some ideas on how you can achieve this look.

1. Start with a base or "trunk" for your tree. There are many options for this, but a small wooden dowel cut to the length that you see fit is a good place to start. Additionally you could use a wire coat hanger stretched out and cut to the desired length if you wanted to create a tree that has a bending appearance.

2. Next, you will need a tall container of some sort. You can cut off the top of a milk jug, carton or use a coffee can.

3. You will need to fill this container with Elmer's glue that has been slightly diluted with water. An alternative is to use spray adhesive, which comes in a spray can and is pretty sticky.

4. Dip your dowel or trunk into your vat of glue, or spray with adhesive.

5. Using loose turf that you can buy at any hobby shop, sprinkle this onto your sticky dowel.

6. Shake off any excess

7. Voila! You now should have a sharp looking pine tree.