Epsom Model Railway Club Show

Epsom Show at Nescot

There were some great layouts at the Epsom Club show this weekend, held as usual at Nescot College in Ewell. I always enjoy this show as they seem to find great layouts and have a good cross section of traders. Assuming they will be there again next year, it's well worth looking up and putting in your diary. There are a few pictures below to show you some of the layouts but there were many more and the quality was excellent across the board.

Very nice narrow gauge slate quarry on multiple levels with working lift.

Excellent N Gauge with real attention to detail.

One of my favourites, put on by the Crawley Club I believe. Country farm at one end, then this lovely row of houses on the corner, each with a different garden and town with bowling green on the other corner. It's also a Southern Railway setting which appeals to me and as a round and round there are plenty of train movements with nice period stock.

Nice narrow gauge railway in a European setting.

Excellent Swiss railway on multiple levels with great scenes and figures all over the layout, including a working Faller system bus.

A very small layout but the buildings are superb, including the roses on the walls and plants in the conservatory.

Scalescenes Tunnel

Blog 2

 

The second Scalescenes project attempted was the tunnel mouth. I downloaded the red brick version, being typical of the Southern Region I am modelling. What's nice about the Scalescene kits is that they are produced in different finishes, which not only includes different colours of bricks but various stone finishes as well. There are also four different curves for the aperture, plain arch and oval, for single or double track layouts.

The kit went together very well except the tunnel section which I found a bit fiddly. As you can see from the photos first you cut out the tunnel aperture, then the tunnel section, scoring slots in the back so it will curve (the dashed red lines) and then gluing the brick paper to what will be the inside.

The problem I had with this was the tunnel section is made of thick card an wants to spring open or twist. The only way to avoid this is to make the scores very deep but then it can become flimsy or you can end up cutting right trough the card. The second problem was the brick liner. The instructions advise you to glue on the brick paper and work in a curve pushing out bubbles and creases from the centre. Having used Prit Stick this grabbed very quickly, preventing movement and resulting in horrible creases on the inside of the tunnel.

My solution, after printing the appropriate page again, was to produce the tunnel section in plain card and then tape in the tunnel mouth cut out as a former. This helped to keep the tunnel section curved and straight. The tunnel face was then glued on and again temporarily taped with Tamiya masking tape to hold it in place.

Once dry the tape was removed and it was then far easier to glue in the brick paper with the correct curve already in place. The photo below shows the tunnel edging bricks being glued down on the tunnel face neatly hiding any join. You can see the excess tunnel liner at the bottom, which is still to be trimmed off. Why so long? Well it has to fit double track tunnels as well the single track version I was building.

The rest of the kit was very straight forward and went together beautifully. One big tip I would give anyone thinking of making cardboard kits though is to colour in the edges. The Metcalfe kits are very nice but time and again I see pictures in magazines where all the edges and corners of the red brick walls are clearly grey card. If the edge is white paper then effect is even worse. It's a very simple process to colour them in and only takes a few minutes to complete. I use watered down acrylics, as I paint a lot of models and I can get a good colour match. However coloured pencils, water colours and felt tip pens can be just as effective. My only word of caution is that card can be very absorbent and can draw the ink out of felt tip pens very quickly, so try them on a piece of scrap first. The wet colour can also look too dark, so give it time to dry out.

A First Look at Scalescenes

A First Look at Scalescenes

My railway club is building a 00 layout with a long stretch of terraced houses lining the back scene. The intention was to detail Metcalfe kits with gutters, slate roofs, panelled doors, letterboxes, lintels and soil pipes. However, once I had drawn up a template of the road and worked out how many kits were needed I was rather stunned. It turned out it was going to take in excess of thirty! Detailing that many kits was ok but the cost to the club was going to be prohibitive. On top of that the road is on a slight curve so the shops and houses will need to be tapered to form a continual terrace, even with the prudent inclusion of alleyways and the occasional detached building. Adapting a pre-cut kit in this way is not necessarily an easy thing and mistakes can costly if you get it wrong. This led me to look at the Scalescene kits, which often feature in the Hornby Model Railway magazine.

There is a full range of both railway and domestic buildings including terraced houses and shops to suit our layout. For those of you who do not know about these kits, you purchase and download the PDF file and can then print the kit or parts of the kit as many times as you like. The drawbacks are the cost of printer ink and that you have to glue the printouts to card and cut out the parts, while the Metcalfe kits are all pre cut. However, it also means you can print individual pages for parts, so should I make a mistake tapering a house I can possibly get away with just remaking one or two walls. I can also print them fairly inexpensively in black and white on a laser printer to mock up the shops and houses and see how they will look on the actual layout. Whether I stick to this or not has to be seen, as building around 60 properties twice over may prove too much.

At this point you are probably asking why, if you are talking about terraced houses, have you got pictures of a low relief warehouse on the blog? Well before I jumped in and started buying things I wanted to try out a kit to see how easy they are to build. Fortunately Scalescenes provides a couple of kits on their web site that are free to download and try out, the low relief warehouse being one of them.

I followed the guidance on the site that gives you hints and tips on materials and was very surprised how enjoyable and easy it was to put together. The instructions are very clear and have plenty of graphic illustrations and although the kit is free it comes with a number of different company and warning signs to suit different uses and eras. I printed the kit on photo matt paper as this is a little thicker than standard letter paper, takes the glue better and is very white, so the colours are strong and vivid (you should see the new recycled paper we have at work it’s a like a used dishcloth). It’s more expensive of course but you can find it for around £7.00 for 100 sheets.

I have since bought and built some of the other kits and they will feature in later articles but I have to say that I am very impressed with the kits and would thoroughly recommend them to anyone thinking of trying them out. After all, the warehouse, small goods store and inspection pit are free, so what have you got to loose?