It's a Cardboard World

When I started to consider the scenery I initially painted areas of the board where 

I wanted the various major elements to go, brown for platforms, grey for biuildings and green for fields. To my surprise this immediately highlighted a couple of areas where my vision was not going to work, primarily the road running around the inside of the layout. The road followed the track and used all the available space leaving no room for buildings or scenery. Not very interesting. After some thought I decided to put in a sharp left turn towards the scenic break and place a builders yard on the inside corner. This also had the added advantage of giving me the room on end board for the semidetatched houses I wanted.

I then decided that simple 3D models of the major scenic elements would give an even better visualisation of the layout, how the various elements would look and if they blended together well. I could have built a reduced scale model of the layout but the real thing was set up for several months in my mum's garage I decided to build them full size. I had an excellent source of raw material for this as my office uses a lot of photocopy paper and the reams come in thin but sturdy corrugated boxes. Even better the boxes are hardly glued together and could easily be flat packed for the journey home.

The first thing I built was the station and the platforms, which quickly made me realise just how close the station was going to be the the edge of the board but at least it confirmed it would fit, just.  

Next was the bridge. I initially decided to put this diagonally across the left hand corner of the layout,  so there was more interest than a bridge at right angles across the track. However, the cardboard model presented me with a dilemma as it cut the scenic space in two, really limiting how the remaining space could be used. 

In real life the road to the left of the station climbs up to the bridge and I was also intending to build this, adding some single storey shops for interest. This didn't work however as the shops and slope almost completely hid the trains from the viewing public. The solution was suggested by my mum, which was to move the bridge towards the station but still keeping it slightly oblique to the track. This retained a more natural look while giving the corner space back for scenery. I also decided to keep the road flat so as to not hide the trains but still allowing me to include the single storey shops. Finally I had to discard the waiting room as there was just not enough space between the platform and the track in the goods yard behind it. A little frustrating but one of the constraints of the narrow boards but I will still be keeping the platform canopy though. 

Metcalfe kits were used for the engine and goods sheds but the foot bridge, terraced housing, and fencing were all made of cardboard. Everything was built very quickly and held together with no more than Sellotape, pva glue and Pritt Stick. All the effort was well worth it though and will hopefully mean the scenery is much more pleasing and interesting for the public.

Scalescenes Christmas Cards

No Scalescenes don't do Christmas cards but with the festive season upon me I decided to turn two of their kits into cards with a difference. It was also nice to be able to build a couple of the Scalescenes kits that normally wouldn't have a need for on my layout. 

The first Christmas card utilised the Low Relief Cinema kit T006. I regularly go to the cinema with a friend of mine and thought this would be an ideal theme, as long as I could make it look Christmasy enough.

As usual it was a great kit to build and the options are excellent. It's almost two kits in one as you can build it as a cinema or shop, with a brick or block faced building. The centre aperture in the upper section becomes the stairwell and lifts for the shop and it comes with a variety of popular high street names for the entrance. The cinema also comes with several period names and styles, from pre-war to modern day. There is also a selection of film posters to suit the various decades since the war. The clever bit is that while the Scalescene's Pdf's are protected from editing, the designer John Whiffen has enabled a clever little facility to allow the reader to add their own text above the entrance. While this is meant to be for the film of choice it was an ideal opportunity to add a Christmas greeting.

 

As usual the kit went together very well and the instructions were very clear. The only glitch I had was the opening in the stone block frontage that goes around the entrance. Although I made it to the correct size, once wrapped around the building there was a large gap between the walls and the doors. After some head scratching and double checking it became apparent that it was the material I was using and not the kit that was at fault. Scalescenes recommend 2mm greyboard and the link to a supplier listed theirs as 2300 microns, which I presume is 2.3mm. I was using regular mount board from the art shop which was only around 1.7mm. It was the slimness of this mount board of up to half a millimetre that was causing the problem. However, all was not lost as I simply printed the required pages again and created a new building front with a slightly narrower aperture for the doors. It's worth noting that the wall coverings in these kits wrap around the edges of  the windows and doors, so the fact that I made the opening a little smaller didn't mean I had bare card exposed down each side.

As a personal touch I didn't use the film posters supplied with the kit but went to Flixter and downloaded the film posters of what we had seen over the last year. I then scaled these to size in Word, printed them off and cut them out. Colouring the edges of course as all the borders were black.

Next came the snow. I wanted the snow to have volume, look realistic but to also have that Christmas sparkle. Fortunately my mother is an avid card maker and gave me three different samples of snow and sparkle effects. One was like very fine scenic scatter, one tiny sparkly snow and one more like a glitter. I sampled them all and none of them gave the effect I was looking for. The answer was to mix all three together, so it had volume, whiteness and sparkle. I avidly applied PVA to all the top surfaces and edges and carefully added the scatter before turning in for the night. I though it look great, however I didn't know it at the time but I had made a newbie mistake. The snow was applied to the white PVA which acted like a primer base but by the morning the PVA had dried and was now translucence, so the nice white snow on the pavement was now a dirty grey! It was very disappointing and I prevaricated for some time as to what course of action to take. It was too horrible to leave as it was and too delicate scrape off, so I decided to paint all the snow white and then re-flock everything. To my surprise this turned out for the best, the snow was now very white and the second layer gave it added volume.

The final touches were to add two people, a bus stop and a greeting on the back in the form of two Christmas themed cinema tickets. Interestingly these are original Airfix figures and not the Dapol figures. Although they are fundamentally the same their size and the detail is slightly different. The Dapol figures still have detail, so I don't think it's the original mould that has just started to wear, it is more like the originals have been copied and new tooling used.

What was the other card? It was the garage, again covered in snow but this time with icicles and Santa's sleigh broken down outside. I hope to cover this in my next article, so watch this space.

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?