Claptowte Railway - Trees

David1226 · 31 Mar 2020

I’m sure we have all seen for ourselves that on the majority of indoor/portable/exhibition G Scale layouts there is usually a shortage of trees, certainly any reasonably tall trees. The majority of ready- made items are usually no taller than 35cm and often have foliage that is over scale. They can also prove rather expensive. If you make your own trees, either using the wound wire armature method, or the dowel trunk/furnace filter (or similar mesh) pine tree style, the results can look stunning but are time consuming.

For a long time I have been on the lookout for a quick and cheap method of representing trees with a reasonable, if not exactly scale appearance. A while back I was searching Ebay and Amazon for some artificial plants for the conservatory. I came across an artificial cedar branch that measured 44cm long, or to put it another way, literally, if stood upright it makes a model cedar tree 44cm tall. This was on Ebay, £3.99 post free. I bought six.

My original intention was to fit spikes to the bottom of the trunks so that the trees could be ‘planted’ into the scenery on the layout. Due to a change of plan/layout design, instead I mounted the trees on plywood discs that can be placed on a flat surface and held firmly in place with a few small blobs of blu-tack. Again from Ebay, I obtained laser cut circles on 3mm thick plywood of various diameters to suit the size of tree, for not much money. I rounded off the top edge of the plywood discs to reduce the apparent thickness.

For the 44cm tall trees I used 60mm diameter bases. In order to fix these, I drilled a countersunk hole on the underside of the disc, and having squared off the end of the stem, I inserted a screw up into the trunk.

If, as was my original intention, you glued a metal spike to the bottom of the trunk, instead of the plywood disc, being completely weatherproof, they could be used outdoors by just pushing the spike into the ground.

David

David1226 · 31 Mar 2020

At the same time, I found a spray of five connected cedar foliage stems 42cm long for £3.49, post free. When cut into individual stems, it gives me five trees 35-36cm tall, I bought two stems, giving me ten trees.

The ‘trunks’ of these trees are on the thin side so in order to thicken them up I wound layers of masking tape around the stem. I then gave the tape two thick coats of white PVA glue to bind it all together and to give a surface to paint.

For the small 35-36mm trees I squared off the masking tape at the base of the trunk, leaving a short peg of the wire core protruding. I then drilled a hole, the diameter of the wire, in the centre of the plywood disc and superglued the tree into its base. For these trees I used 50mm diameter discs, again with the top edge rounded off.

I already had masking tape, glue and paint, so the only cost was the cedar sprays and plywood discs. The end cost was ten 35-36cm trees at £1.05 each.

David

dunnyrail · 31 Mar 2020

Look very good David found plenty of options on ebay including lots of interesting Bonzai ones as well.

David1226 · 31 Mar 2020

It was my intention to purchase some more of the 42cm stems but the original supplier was no longer trading. Following a search on Amazon I sourced some stems that were 54cm long, so taller still. So far I have two of these, fixed to plywood 80mm discs using screws.