As Model Railroader Video Plus producer David Popp explained in the first installment of this project layout series in January, the raison d’etre of the N scale Canadian Canyons is railfanning. The model railroad is designed to reproduce scenes seen by Drew Halverson, Kent Johnson, and Charlie Conway on a train-watching trip they documented in a series of videos for MRVP. [See “Drew’s Trackside Adventures,” episodes 29 through 31. – Ed.] So as important as scenery usually is to a model railroad, it’s even more important on this one.
The Fraser and Thompson river canyons that are the focus of this project feature rugged mountain terrain that can only be described as spectacular. Starting with a skeleton of extruded-foam insulation board, Kent, David, and Drew used three methods to model the different kinds of rock strata visible in the canyons of British Columbia.