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?