That's pretty wide open

One technique is indeed to use sheets of pink or blue insulation foam, carved out for your terrain. Usually gets covered by the some other spreadable material.

Another is to use wood framing and then use some sort of material to provide a web to define terrain features that you can then cover in plaster or similar material.

As for bridges... Truss, girder or trestle, and what Era?

Thanks Jeff!

Thanks Jeff! I have found a technique that i enjoy the most which is cutting Styrofoam in large pieces and then placing some material that is used in quilts over it and gluing it down with modpodge, lastly adding scenery and painting over it. My locomotive is fairly small (Pacific flyer locomotive HO) so it would fit a small layout on a wooden table i believe. and bridges are widely available on Amazon for a nice price, also go for building and most of Plasticville products are on their from Bachmann. But I will buy my scenery from my local hobby shop as they carry water products as well. Hobby lobby is good too. 

Best Resource

Your local library should have a number of books that go step-by-step through building a layout, different plans, and some about wiring and scenery.  Both Kalmbach and Carstens published how-to books.  The library is cheaper than buying them at your hobby store.

I built my layout on a wooden support topped with styrofoam layers which I carved with knives, hot wire cutter and soldering gun.  Then added earth colored paint and scenic materials to finish the job. 

Enjoy learning some new things as you build.

Per feedback from Rob Spangler my first attempt on last layout

I per one of Rob Spanglers methods, I used luan plywood for a river bottom and skimmed it with a couple layeres of drywall mud and sanded it smooth.

I then added river banks using cardboard strips.

I used acrylics mixed to color the river bottom per feedback from Rob

The colors looked much better in person but the 5k LED lights were over bright:

I used gloss Mod Podge, perhaps a little thick, for the water surface:

You can see the inner  parts of the river are shallow as would be prototypical and the outer parts scoured deeper:

@jimfitch

Jim, technically, that’s a pretty nice job on the waterway water. However, the banks are too uniform. It looks more like a man made canal than a river in nature. The river banks are way too uniform.

Check out the banks on this river … they tend to be quite undulating in nature:

@Joe.  The river never got

@Joe.  This was my first effort at a river so consider it a noob job.  The river never got finished (i.e. banks) which is obvious.  After that point the layout had to be taken down for a move.  Rivers in the area modeled would have had rip rap or rock along the shores.  Another thing I didn't do right was to have the land drop away from the track,; the track should have been elevated considerably more above the immediate landscape. 

Anyway, despite not being finished the photos would be useful as intermediary steps of river modeling?

I'd be curious ...

Again, the basic water job with the paint and the rippled gloss medium was well done. The banks, not so much. The ripple technique, while effective, needed some variation to look more realistic.

I'd be curious, did you have a photo reference you were working from?

Right, the banks in some of

Right, the banks in some of the area's in eastern Utah don't look like those in your photo example.  They can actually be relatively smooth and even.

But to answer your question, I wasn't working from a photo reference in that first effort, but just trying my hand at some general basic scenery techniques.  Here is a link to a photo showing a river in Ruby Canyon, part of an area I am interested in somewhat representing.

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-a-juniper-tree-juniperus-sp-above-the-colorado-river-in-ruby-canyon-88011754.html

You can see the banks of the river are relatively even.

I don't know Joe . . .

I think the more detailed bank is more interesting, but I work in Toledo and the Maumee river is pretty plain on the banks.  And the banks of the Ohio River are very smooth around Cincinnati, OH.  I think it depends on what area you are modeling.

Ohio River

The Mississippi

Toilet Paper and Glue

Hi Tom,

If you are a Running Extra subscriber, you could check out my article on making a creek with toilet paper and glue.  Here are a few images.  The first one shows how I stack the foam and fit a bridge and abutments. 

The basic procedure is as Jeff described it.  I built the banks from pink foam, covered them with sculptamold, then used the tp/glue to make the river bottom.  Then I painted it and covered it with gloss, in my case, Woodland Scenics Realistic Water, because I had two bottles.  I didn't pour it . . . I painted it on.

river banks

When modelling a river, creek etc. The banks should flow naturally into the water and out on the other bank. In other words it should look like that if you removed the water the shore and river bottom would be one continuous inverted bell curve, or at least look like it is, from one side to the other. If you don't have that shape, the eye immediately recognizes the shape is unnatural. only in steep solid rock channels with fast moving water are there ever undercuts in the bank. Undercuts in mud, dirt. loose rock or sand would immediately collapse and wash downstream, so slow moving water in that type terrain have wide tapered concave banks where they enter the water. They slip in rather than dropping in.