building a scene

[asciibaron]

i have a few scenes i am looking to recreate such as this one:



and this one:



i'm not much of a diorama person and have never really tried to recreate a scene from a photo - any suggestions other than "make it look like the picture, dude." (i'm looking at you Lee and Ed).  i have pretty much given up on building  layout that is operational beyond simply moving trains over the mountains - the MILW really didn't have a ton of on-line customers (thus a fallen flag) so there really isn't much to do except get the trains over the grades...  with DCC i will be able add and subtract helpers, so that adds interest.

-Steve

[3rdrail]

Are you talking about a stand alone diorama, a module to be used as part of a layout, or a permanent layout? Roger Holmes has constructed very similar scenes on his N scale MILW, so he might chime in, but techniques would differ depending on whether or not the scene has to be moved around a lot. For example, those highly vertical scenes may be easier to do in the traditional plaster and screenwire method, but get kind of heavy.

[asciibaron]

i was going to do a stand-alone diorama of Eagle Nest, but i have decided to just build a permanent layout instead.

[wcfn100]

The only thing I know about recreating a scene is that there are no shortcuts.  If you want the rock to look right, you might be carving by hand and that could be the easy part as you need to get the right color as well.  You will need to scratch build the overhead which could mean shaving wood dowels to the right thinkness and taper not to mention the fine wire/thread to represent the cat.  And you need to spend extra amount of time on the track and road bed since it'll be in almost every view. 

Jason