Finishing the 1st type of retaining wall

In the post last March titled Japanese style retaining walls, I showed prototype photos of two different types of retaining walls I have seen along side the rail lines.  In that post, I also showed the beginnings of the walls I was building from styrene plastic.

For reference, I again show the prototype photo here.  Most of these that I've seen are not quite this bent up.


Recall from that previous post, the wall sections were made from .080 square styrene rod attached to .020 styrene sheet.

When this was fully assembled, it was air brushed with Model Master acrylic aged concrete color.

Then the spaces between the rods were hand painted with a grimy black color.

After the black paint had dried over night, a bit of scenic cement was applied to each section then fine turf color ground foam was sprinkled on top of that.

The retaining wall was attached to the module with Liquid Nails for projects and held in place with home made spring clamps as shown in this photo.

When the wall structure is blended in with the surrounding scenery it begins to look like this.  A bit of the ground foam has fallen out of a few of the spaces.  The reason I painted those areas was to help hide this.


Next I used a bamboo skewer to apply small amounts of diluted white glue to those bare areas where the turf ground foam had fallen off.  Then sprinkled on some fine green ground foam and that tended to settle near the bottom of the sections.  I also added coarse green ground foam in some of the sections to simulate foliage that might grow out between the columns.

The photo above shows the completed retaining wall section.  While I am quite happy with the way this came out, it was a lot of work !  This is only about 9 inches at one end of the module out of almost 60 inches of retaining walls needed.  At this point the rest of the retaining walls are going to be the second type which go together much quicker.  In the near future I will post about finishing those.