I picked up some more cardstock in a variety of colors and patterns, some of which are shown below.

I’m fiddling with different ideas for representing land and ground cover in layouts. The light green stripe and grid patterns are possibilities for farm land, and the dark green with its irregular pattern might work there as well. I have some lighter, solid greens that I am considering in small patches to make parks, or to use for the ground around lakes and ponds. The solid browns and tans could be used to represent dirt, perhaps as shorelines or in industrial areas.

The black and white textured paper is sort of a wildcard in that I don’t quite know what I want to do with it, but envision it as a way of representing gravel as-is, or sanded lightly (the paper is designed for that) to become a faded blacktop.

I just finished making a layout that incorporates a large number of my newer BRIO pieces, dating from about 2007 and on, as well as a fairly large double track layout. The central theme was to create an airport around the #33306 Airplane Boarding Set and a mass transit loop with multiple stops to connect to it. Sadly, this particular set is not currently available in the U.S., but you can either buy it from an international seller or get it’s larger brother, the Monorail Airport Set, from Amazon to get a plane in white and red instead of blue and white.

The runway was something I built myself. It’s a 4″ x 24″ x 3/16″ sheet of basswood which I sprayed with several coats of Rust-Oleum black lacquer paint to build up a nice surface. Once it had cured for several days, I created a plastic stencil for the runway markings and applied them with Rust-Oleum’s white lacquer spray in about five or six light passes. I let that cure for several days, as well. To make the rest of the airport I simply reappropriated existing BRIO accessories. The late-90’s vintage #33564 Signal House looks so much like a control tower that some people on eBay mistake it for an airport, so that was an obvious choice. For the terminal building, I chose the 90’s vintage #33663 Railway Station only without the decorative window on top.

The water that forms the main lake, ponds, and the sea port is light blue cardstock that has been hot laminated for durability (this also had the side effect of making the water slightly reflective, which is a nice effect). This is something I discussed in an earlier blog post and you can see the final look in the rest of the layout photos.

View the album directy on flickr if you don’t have Flash or if you’re on a mobile device.

Here’s the track plan (click to enlarge):

This was arranged on my two 8′ x 3′ laminated plywood sheets which I use as table tops. This layout does make use of two pieces of A3 track at the crossover, though that is easily changed if you don’t have A3 or an equivalent straight.

One of the many things I loved about the early 90’s BRIO catalogs and retail boxes is the layouts used in the product photos. There was a very minimalistic approach to creating a landscape for the railway system, consisting of felt cutouts and painted backdrops to represent the sky, ground, and water, such as on this product photo taken from the 1991 catalog:

I’ve been building my layouts on a laminated table surface for many years, using a Wilsonart laminate in hunter green to represent the ground, but only recently have I turned my attention to trying to represent water in my scenery. As much as I love the look of the laminate, having boats sailing on a sea of green needed to change. But what to do?

BRIO’s approach of using felt really resonated with me, but it was also the opposite of what I needed. They started with blue water as their base and built up the land around it, where I was starting with land and needed to overlay a water look on top of it. Felt is simply too thick. David Harper’s approach was to use plastic table covers in green and blue, but his layouts span multiple tables and he’s covering a much wider area. I needed something just as thin, only smaller in size.

What I settled on was colored cardstock. Specifically, the 12″ square cardstock used for scrapbooking, and available at arts and craft stores and sold as loose sheets. I chose a light blue color, specifically one called “powder blue” at Joann Fabrics, so that it would contrast against the darker green of my table top. Cardstock is thick enough to be durable but thin enough that overlapping sheets still lay reasonably flat.

Taking inspiration from BRIO, I cut several of my cardstock pieces into circles using a large circle cutter—I recommend the Martha Stewart Crafts Circle Cutter for this task as it doesn’t create a hole in the center of the disc—creating several circles that were 11.5″, 9.5″, and 6″ in diameter to give me multiple sizes to work with. I also created two more of the large 11.5″ diameter circles and split them in half with a paper cutter so that I could start the water along the edge of my table. (I also left some sheets as squares, and cut some into 3″x12″, 6″x12″, and 9″x12″ rectangles for modeling water along table ends.) Finally, for extra durability, I had them hot laminated.

To create the water effect, start with the half-circles at the edge and then overlap the larger circles to expand the lake or river, filling in with the smaller ones to eliminate gaps and finish off the edges. Adjust circles as needed, adding the smallest ones along the edges until you are satisfied with the look. Here’s a layout plan using SketchUp with the edges turned on to show the circle placement:

And without the edges to better represent the final look:

And this is what final effect looks like in a (not-yet-complete) layout:

The beauty of the scrapbook cardstock approach is that it’s cheap and the paper is available in a wide variety of colors, some even with abstract textures. You can even use craft techniques such as sponges and paints to add your own texture effects to the paper. You aren’t limited to water, either, and can use other colors and textures to represent different types of land.

Perhaps best of all it’s also a wood product, which is in the spirit of your wooden railway system.