Making New England rocks

[John]

I missed the watercourse part of the equation. Is it smooth? I guess thats in the eye of the beholder.

Lewiston Maine

same place -- when there is high water

[nkalanaga]

The long-exposed rocks up there were also ground down by glaciers during the Ice Age, which further smoothed and rounded them. 

[OldEastRR]

I guess you can see this in different ways -- I know the rocks there aren't round and smooth like puffs of dough, if that what I implied. In the picture of the train going over the falls there are edges to the rocks, but there are no sign of sharp ones. I don't plan on having any blasted-out rock cuts along ROWs, as the oldest rail routes (like the NH and B&A) usually followed natural watercourses. The rivers there for the most part also don't have deep v-shaped beds, tho they can have rock outcroppings along them.
As for blasted cuts, I've wondered for a long time why nobody makes molds of such regularly shaped rock forms (usually terraces) complete with the borehole grooves where the blasting charges were placed in. 110 years of model railroading and no one's ever made a mold of a man-made rock face. Who said there are no more frontiers in model railroading?

[Scottl]

You are describing rock that is subangular   

I tend to pay a lot of attention to the landscape and I try to identify features that are distinctive.  On my current layout I have put in drill marks by scoring the rock cast vertically with a hacksaw blade.  Most people don't notice them in person and it is almost invisible in pictures.  I made it subtle to reflect the norm.  Remember too that older cuts won't have vertical drill remnants and many have been reworked by heavy equipment or were blasted with older techniques.  I have some rock molds made from 3D scanning of fresh real sections and the drill casts are there, but hard to see. 

Rock exposures are relatively rare in valley bottoms, especially in the eastern US where most valleys have substantial sedimentary fills.  This is less the case as you move to the headwaters and slopes increase and sediment fills are thinner.  Cuts tend to occur naturally where rivers actively erode and remove material.  Early rail surveyors either avoided those settings or were forced to blast and tunnel.  What exposures that do occur along the right of way are almost always due to engineering.

In the end, what looks right to your eyes is what matters (not in the cliche your layout should be what you want way) as our perception of landscape is very much artificial.  The reality is that most people don't see the landscape and recognize the various distinctive features.  They recognize and recall focus points, often dramatic or human features, but also form an overall sense of the landscape based on texture, color and scale.  This is why often crude renditions of important features "look" right:  the cotton ball deciduous forest is an example of this.  Individually, they sure don't look like trees, but as a whole, they satisfy the sense of what the forest looks like.  The same applies to rock or the landforms and especially water features (which as modelled are often abominations of reality).

[nkalanaga]

I've noticed the drill holes often on newer highway cuts, but, as Scottl says, they're rare on railroad cuts, as most or the work was done before modern vertical drilling rigs were available.

Most railroad cuts were done with basically the same techniques used in mining and tunnel drilling, start at one end and drill/blast/shovel horizontally to the other.

[OldEastRR]

In the end, what looks right to your eyes is what matters (not in the cliche your layout should be what you want way) as our perception of landscape is very much artificial.  The reality is that most people don't see the landscape and recognize the various distinctive features.  They recognize and recall focus points, often dramatic or human features, but also form an overall sense of the landscape based on texture, color and scale.  This is why often crude renditions of important features "look" right:  the cotton ball deciduous forest is an example of this.  Individually, they sure don't look like trees, but as a whole, they satisfy the sense of what the forest looks like.  The same applies to rock or the landforms and especially water features (which as modelled are often abominations of reality).

Amen!

I put a lot of waterways on my NE scene layout because I knew around them is really only where you'd see exposed rock. Maybe at the top of a weathered knoll (why I'm driven to have rock formations at all on a NH-clone layout is a whole nother story). But because of the waterways the rocks will be somewhat smoother and rounded than usual than in rock molds.
But I'm a big believer in drainage as part of the scenic look. You should be able to tell where the water goes on the layout when it "rains", even if there is no water running through those paths now. A really great idea on a layout I saw was a streambed with no water in it, but bright green silflor tufts running a thin line down the middle, with dead dry grass everywhere else. Couldn't see water but your mind assumed it was there.