Building a Model Railroad

It's a matter of practicality.
You're playing a game with miniatures. Gently rolling hills aren't an option since top heavy models will easily fall on their ass (potentially breaking something). You can't have nice dense forests as that makes placing mini's a bitch. It all comes to balance, and since the terrain is made to play games, on, practicality always comes first.

The real art in wargames terrain comes from getting that ballance just right (beutiful terrain that is still practical to play on)

That, and people are generally more interested in investing time into playing the game over modeling pretty terrain to play on.

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Originally Posted by SnaFuBAR

I had an HO scale set when I was a kid. There was nowhere for me to keep it constructed, so I'd set it all up differently every time. How are you going to sculpt the terrain? With styrofoam and acetone?

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Exactly.

And as for the mountains, I've found that paper mache works wonders. Looks real, too.

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Originally Posted by rossmum

Why not have both?

All-out war in a rail marshalling yard. Awesome.

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You know, I actually saw a layout which had a war going on all over it at a train show last weekend. There were tanks everywhere, and one cool thing they added was an airplane which came out of a cloud and divebombed a group of soldiers (complete with sound effects) before going back into the cloud.
All the trains were carrying war supplies, too. It was pretty neat to see.

Oh god, I've always wanted to do this D: I too had a train set when I was a kid. It was a nice mini one, and I built a table with some basic hills and a bridge on it, where it ran.

I had an OO set when I was younger, Dad and I built a few, never finished them though, time was an issue you see.

Hopefully you will finish yours :D

This isnt mine, a random Google image but it shows what British Great Western Railway's ones are like.
http://www.team-triplet.com/TTimages/2005/P5153278.jpg

Man, I've always loved those things, though never got to play around with them. :(

I'm actually really interested to see where you'll go with this.

I've seen one that depicts a bunch of civilians and civil srvants engaging in less-than-pristine activities. It was humorously awesome. There were robberies, murders, sexual acts and vandalism going on in a formerly picturesque small town. It even had police beatings!

Man... I had a 5'x10' plywood table set up with HO-scale track about 6-8 years ago. Still have all the parts but I have no place to set them up. Had a dozen cars, three locomotives (Canadian National locomotives and Canadian Pacific Rail tug) and a ton of Hot Wheels running around the thing. Sure, the HO scale and the Hot Wheels don't exactly match up... at all... but DAMN it was fun. Hope you have tons of fun with this... and ignore my obvious jealous looks for not having a room to build this stuff in for myself :(

My childhood dream :'(

Good luck with this. I can't wait to see it done.

All boys first start off wanting to make a train set, and then when they grow up... they want guns... Aha. :p

Anyways, I had a train set once, my brothers spent hundreds of dollars.. Then we had to move.. and it was all destroyed. :(

I would love to see this go further though. :p

*Sigh*
Construction on the legs will have to wait until Monday or so, when I can borrow my friend's saw and get a nice, straight cut (Don't want to have a wobbly table).
On the bright side, my order of track just went in ($100 to get started), and should ship from New Jersey in 3-4 business days.