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.
Nice Build. These are nice Models.
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