HOW TO
BUILD A MODERN RETAINING WALL
EXPERT MODELLERS SHOW YOU HOW
Peter Marriott employs simple techniques and cheap materials to recreate an interesting concrete lineside structure.
While building one of my recent project layouts, I needed to recreate a pile ‐driven concrete retaining wall, using an example I’d seen in Spiez, Switzerland as inspiration.
Built within the last 25 years, the wall consists of substantial concrete ‘posts’, standing in vertical rows, with flat panels of concrete sitting in between. This seemed like an ideal backscene for my modern image layout, allowing a road and an array of low-relief buildings to be placed at a high level, creating a greater sense of depth to the scene.
In real life, it appears that the railway has been driven through the landscape and, with existing dwellings at a higher level, the retaining wall must withstand a huge weight of land behind it. The concrete piles feature a surprisingly rough texture, giving the structure a distinctive appearance.
Along the upper edge of the wall is a variety of fencing materials, from wire mesh to concrete panels and even toughened glass!
I enjoy modelling Swiss prototypes, but I also considered how such a structure could be employed on a modern UK layout. New railway infrastructure invariably employs concrete these days and, with new urban lines being built around the capital in recent decades – not to mention HS2 – a concrete retaining wall seemed like a viable modelling prospect.