While most model railroads are set in lush summers or colorful autumns, the snowy northern winter landscapes offer unparalleled visual drama. From paint to grout to powder stone to commercially available modeling products, there are many possible answers to the question of how to model snow in a model railroad layout. Modelers describe many of these techniques on the following pages. model railway For many years. If you want to know how to realistically model snow on a train layout, keep reading.
Woodland Scenics Soft Flake Snow
Gary Hoover demonstrated his winterization techniques for layouts. model railwayThe December 2020 and November 2023 issues use off-the-shelf Woodland Scenics Soft Flake Snow (item number SN140) to give an HO scale Norfolk & Western layout a chilly look. Since he is modeling West Virginia in early spring, he gave the layout only a light dusting of white after finishing other landscaping. To apply this, use Vintage Reproductions' accordion-like puffer and a light spritz of hairspray to hold it in place. To model winter water, he paints the bank with full-strength white glue and sprinkles soft he flake he snow on top. He also applies some bush icicles to bridges, tunnel entrances, and building overhangs.
When Bill Nelson hired professional layout construction company RailDreams Inc. to build his Winter Wonderland layout, RailDreams' builders also used soft flake snow from Woodland Scenics. But they wanted a deeper snowpack, so they didn't use Gary's technique of gluing the snow together with hairspray. Rather, they shaped the terrain with white sculptamold (a moldable papier-mâché-like product) and sprinkled soft flake snow onto the sculptamold while it was still wet. You can read about Bill's layout in the February 2009 issue.
Modeler Jim Rohrbach similarly used Woodland Scenics products to create an HO scale Great Northern diorama landscape inspired by famous railroad paintings. He sprinkled his flakes of soft snow onto the terrain in plaster shells and glued them with cement. Picture-perfect results featured in the January 2023 issue.
Knock and Bush snow products
When Josef Brandl, a professional European layout builder, was asked by a client to build a layout for the Alps, he needed to quickly figure out how to model the snowy landscape. He began by covering the mountainous terrain with white painted plaster of varying textures to achieve different effects. But to achieve a more realistic look, he added Noch His Powder Snow and Bush His Snow His Powder. These can be applied to dry landscapes or mixed into a paste to model clumpy snowdrifts thrown aside by railroad snowplows. As you can see above, the results were great. Josef's technique is detailed in an article in the February 2007 issue.
powder marble
When Scott Kramer started building his HO scale Great Northern layout (see February 2008 issue), there weren't many commercially available snow products. Taking a cue from professional pool builders, he mixed crushed marble into the plaster. This natural stone product will never yellow. Available in grades from fine powder to coarse sand, Scott uses it to model snow broken up by snowplows.
Mike Danneman also used Arizona Rock & Mineral's white marble powder to model the snow around the railroad tracks on the N scale Denver & Rio Grande Western layout. This was featured in the December 2011 issue. Rather than mix it with plaster, he sculpted plowed snow between and around the N-gauge rails and then used landscape cement to adhere it. But in other parts of the scene, he sprayed the terrain with wet water and sprinkled with dry Hydrocal, a fine-grained plaster product. Once that was dry, he applied yet another layer. He glued white flocking to the pine trees before installing them into the layout.
unsanded grout
Many of these techniques require the use of some kind of adhesive, such as landscape cement, to secure the snow material to the layout surface. But Doug Tagsold discovered a glue-based snow material: grout that doesn't contain sand. Grout, the stone material used to fill the gaps between ceramic tiles, comes in polished (coarse) and unpolished types. Sand-free grout is fine enough to represent snow well. Doug simply sprays the terrain with water and sifts his powder over the dry grout. One advantage of this technique is that the grout adheres only to areas where snow accumulates, rather than to vertical surfaces such as the sides of cliffs. Doug explained his method in his February 2021 magazine. model railway.
Modeling a melting snowdrift
Now you know how to model snow in your model train layout. But what if we modeled the “muddy season” of early spring, when most of the snow has melted but a few deeper snowdrifts remain? He talks about how he experimented with many materials including . However, he found that while it was a good representation of fresh snow, it was unconvincing as a melting snowdrift. After contemplating what he saw outside the window, he cut a small chunk out of a sheet of white craft foam (not the beaded packaging, but the kind you can buy at a craft store). It was too porous to look right, but squishing it flat with his fingers created the texture and shine he wanted. After getting the rough shape, I hot glued the chunks to the matte brown grass of my HO His Scale diorama.
