Daves Trees
Building model redwood trees came of interest after meeting the owner of the Sonoma Mountain Railroad (SMRR). We determined that more than one thousand model redwood trees and an undetermined number of handcrafted oak trees for his Northwestern Pacific Railroad (NWP) HO scale layout.
The areas on SMRR layout where redwood forests would be represented are: Occidental, Streetens Mill, Russian River, Duncans Mills, and Cazadero.
A little history on model redwood trees: Researching commercially available model redwood trees proved to be futile. No retailer offered model "Redwood Trees" that resembled the redwood trees I experienced each day being a resident of Occidental, CA.
Commercial model redwood trees are overpriced and misrepresent these magnificant trees. Most are less than 6 inches tall. To populate the Sonoma Mountain railroad (SMRR) with commercially sold trees would exceed $10,000. My first redwood tree turned out pretty good. The down side, it took nearly 80 hours to build, hardly practical for 1,000 trees.
A modeler building conifer trees using furnace filter material caught my attention. After a bit of trial and error, I created model redwoods closely resembling redwoods I experienced each day. This method eventually provided the basis for my preferred method of building model redwood trees. At this time, the SMRR layout is being populated with +/- 12" model redwood trees. One area of the layout leading into Cazadero is referred to as "Big Trees". These are representations of big redwood trees. Mockups of these trees can be seen on this website: http://www.davestrainsandtrees.com/streetons_diorama_trees.html.