Peter's Model Railroading | Articles | Tools | Cleaning Stuff
Cleaning Scenery

As I have been working on my workbench and the benchwork for my "layout", the "layout" (consisting of one module in mid-2025) has been gathering copious amounts of dust. There is no way I can justify it as "weathering". I have not been able to come up with a good solution to keep the layout clean. A dust rag simply gets snagged on everything, possibly damaging the delicate items on the layout. Since this first module represents a coal tipple's operation, there is supposed to be coal and coal dust everywhere in its immediate vicinity. However, that has now turned into a gray mess. As I was putting all of my model-railroad-related tools away from temporary boxes into the new workbench that holds the layout up, I discovered this brush (shown in the photo). I had bought it at the local grocery store for my hair, but didn't care for what it did to my hair so I "retired" it to my model railroading tools. Initially, my thought was to use the bristles as models of weeds growing along river and creeks. But as I just "found" the brush again, I tried sweeping away the dust on my layout. You can see, pointed to by the orange arrow, the small section I swept with this brush. It worked like magic. The cloud of dust flew up in the air and the coal underlayment returned (the photo is slightly over-exposed). The brush has what I would call medium-strong bristles; not enough to damage anything, but not too weak to not have an effect on the dust. I have found my new layout-cleaning tool! By the way, for locomotives and cars I use a paint brush that looks like a woman's make-up brush; lots of long soft bristles.

Once I cleaned the wide open areas, the areas under the structure that still had dust on them really stood out. Everything is held together with glue, so I still need to be very careful around figures, details, and the thin structural parts of the tipple. I used the brush to get the majority of the dust out off of the track area, by simply carefully dragging it to the end of the module. To get the dust off of the figures, the automobile, and the spaces under the structure beams, I am using an old toothbrush. These work great, because their bristles are not stiff like when they are new, but still have enough strength to them to disturb the dust. The photo shows the first four bays done, but the ones in the back still need to be treated. To get to the back of the module (4 feet deep), I'll have to rotate the module on the benchwork to clean the creek. As opposed to the photo above, this one is closer to the actual color my eyes see.

One day I was cleaning a household item with a bottle brush to get into the nooks and crannies of the item. It all of a sudden dawned on me that this is a great tool for getting into hard-to-reach areas of scenery and structures that need to have their dust removed. I found this set on Amazon, which I liked because it comes with various diameter brushes, so that I can use the larger ones of big areas, and the smallers ones for tighter areas. The bristles aren't hard, so they won't do damage to scenery or structures, but strong enough to have an affect on dust particles. The 10-inch long metal handle allows for reaching into hard-to-get-to spaces. They come attached to a keychain ring, so you can remove the one you want, or take them all off of the ring.

(external link: CiaraQ Bottle Cleaning Brushes)