I have never got to the point of doing scenery, so I'm looking for advice from some of you pros out there. The portion of my layout that will be have scenery is 7' X 15' and has two levels. The second level covers half the total area. My question is this. Do you do landforms before you have assembled your structures, roads and so on or do you get all your structures , roads ect in before doing the landforms? My track work is finished, but no ballasting has been done. Thanks, Ralph.

I'd recommend getting the landforms done first. Otherwise you'll end up dripping plaster, paint etc. on structures, roads and so on. Don't ask me how I know this.

Ralph,
I like to start from the rear near the backdrop and work my way forward. I mark out the rough positions of roads and decide where buildings will go first. Then I plan the major landforms, trying to make it look like the geology determined how the land and buildings were developed.

Then I do the messy parts of the scenery-making process first, with track covered and everything valuable safely removed, having found out why in exactly the same way as deang!

Once I even managed to drip plaster on the dog. That produced a big disgusted sigh as she got up and walked back upstairs to safety.

Jim

Thanks fellas for your input. Ralph