Planning for Winter Village

[Mafortune]

Hello everyone,

I have finally acquired some of the winter village sets, including the holiday train. I am therefore looking building a winter landscape for a christmas village display, but I have never done anything like this before. I am therefore hoping for some tips, tricks and advice on these forums. I have tried searching for similiar threads, but came up short.

As a start, and for this year, we will just build a fla landscape with the train going around, but in the years to come, we hope to develop it towards a layout like the one displayed in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCec2vdvS2Q We are however planning to make everything out of lego, while the guy who made this used other building materials for the landscape.

In the verty beginning, I have some specific questions that I am hoping for guidance on:

1. What kind of white (base)plates should i acquire? The MISC 32x32 plates seems like a good alternative for a completely flat landscape, but maybe not if I am planning on building hills, incorporate tram tracks in the ground, cables for lighting, etc.? For this, the 16x16 91405-plate might be better, but much more expensive. Any advice?

2. Winter landscaping: Making hills and such should be ok, but what about vegetation? I haven't found any trees that are (partly) white or seems snow-covered. And what about other vegetation?

3. Techniques for building hills and landscapes? I would guess that the model becomes very heavy and brick-intensive if I make these solid, but there might be techniques for building them hollow and strong?

4.Technique for mounting train curves on base plates? My initial idea i to use 1x1's where these align and fill out with tiles, but I would assume that there are better ways of doing it?

5. Anything else that need careful consideration before i head over to pick a brick for the first order?

Any help would be much appreciated!