The design of the track plan, with it's tunnels and drastic elevation changes, requires that the layout be in a mountain setting.  I chose an Appalachian setting because I prefer having lots of green trees instead of the sparsely vegetated landscape of the West.  Thicker vegetation will also help visually separate scenes a little better in such a small layout.  At the same time, the coal traffic I want to represent, and the railroads that I normally like to have around, also belong in an Appalachian setting.  So it will be lots of hills, trees, and bushes, and alot of green.

The drawing below shows the locations of the industries (purple), other railroad buildings (light purple), non-railroad buildings (red), asphalt roads (gray), creek (blue), bridges (brown), and gravel drives (tan).  The dark green lumps show the basic location of the built up hills on the layout, while the light green lumps show where vegetation will be between elements which are basically on the same level.

There are several rock cuts, so after a looking at a few options, I chose the ceiling tile method.  The way that things work out, it was just as easy for me to use ceiling tile to build up the hills too.  I used spackling compound (and wood filler in some locations) instead of plaster.  It's a little more expensive, but when you consider the fact that this is a small layout, the difference isn't as considerable as on a large layout.  Due to the size of the layout, and my method of doing things, I work in mostly small areas at one time.  Being able to just open up a container for a little bit of compound every time I needed it was much much better than  having to mix up plaster, and toss the unused portion.  In fact, with all of the unused plaster that might have gone to waste, the spackling compound might not have been more expensive after all.

Working with ceiling tile is very dusty, so I decided to go ahead and do all of the ceiling tile at one time, so that I only have to clean up the mess one time.  While it is very dusty, it is a fine dust that is very easily vacuumed up from practically every surface, unlike dust that is created when cutting up foam, or any "slop" from plaster or the like.  So it's not the worst medium to work with.  Just remember to wear a dust mask when you go to sanding it down.

To make the craggy rockface, I score the ceiling tile along where I want to cut it, place that line over the edge of a board or table, and "snap" it.   There are many different articles and books where this is illustrated well,  so I won't re-hash that here.  For the sides of the hills, I simply stacked up the layers of ceiling tile like one would do with layers of foam.  Then, I simply sanded the contours to my liking with 60 grit sandpaper on a sanding block.  This took a little time and effort, but it came out well.

After the ceiling tile was sanded, I filled the big voids and made final adjustments with spackling compound, and let it dry well overnight.  Then I spread a thin covering of spackling compound over the whole hillside for a uniform surface that covers up the seams between layers.

I included access hatches for as much of the tunnels as I could.  With the ceiling tile, it was pretty straightforward to have separate pieces that fit in like a jigsaw puzzle.  The spackling compound is too fragile to be used at the edges of these access hatches, so I used wood filler at those locations instead, which is the tan you see in some of the pictures.

After I had shaped the landscape, I wanted to try out my final scenicking techniques before committing them to the layout, so I built a little diorama to test and practice my methods (see Test Scene for more information).  After I completed that, I used those techniques to color the rock face, add ballast, and the ground foam.  At this point, I will do each scene individually, and show them under the Scenes page.