BRM Magazine; Station Top 10

So, I can finally put up on here some good news that came my way in the Spring- a regular run of articles in British Railway Modelling! Since Feb, when I was asked to do a little selection of projects, I've been quietly beavering away on a rather varied selection of model-making for them, and the first one is now on the shelves.

The first article is a Top 10 piece on railway stations, and the features to be spotted on preserved lines.

To be honest, it ended up turning practically into an advertising feature for the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, with about half the shots taken there, but given I love the line, no bad thing.

Having photographed lots of the features around railways (including these nice new bins), I wanted to build a photography set for the header of the article. You know, some actual model making here on the model making blog. Shocking.

When I started these projects, the idea was to have everything designed to fit inside a shoebox-sized Really Useful Box, on a roughly A4-sized board. Mission creep being what it is of course, only one of the four builds ended up fulfilling this criteria, but hey-ho.

I'd originally designed this one to fold in half, so I'd have a nice long board for the photographs.

I had to break off a bit from the project though to finish some stuff for Hornby, and do the boring old Day Job, then with limited time left when I restarted it all, I realised that I needed to speed up completion for this particular BRM build if I was going to manage a fancy location shoot whilst we were in Wales. The overcomplicated hinged board idea went out the window, in favour of a more basic board, this time in a Wrapping Paper Box. Still small enough to carry out to location, but no faffing with bolts, hinges, and wing-nuts.

I wanted to create a sort of scene that a beginner could do on a budget, so had a hunt around bargain bins and second-hand stalls in model shops for the bits and pieces to include.

Packing foam hillsides and scenery, Dapol platform, Hornby bridge and halt.

The bridge was undercoated then drybrushed with various shades.

The station building needed to be small and simple; the Hornby Halt is one of my favourites. This one was an absolute bargain in one of the regular sales Hornby have, in fact I think with my loyalty points I might not have even needed to pay more than a couple of quid for this.

A quick repaint with Humbrol and Citadel acrylics, then weathering with Citadel Nuln Oil.

The board was finished in time for shooting some pics whilst up in Wales. The other models I built for BRM were mostly shot at home with an A1 backdrop, but this layout was a little too big for that.

The greenery was a right mix, some surprisingly good quality trees in bulk bought online, and a dive into the box of odds and ends of scatters, static grass, and hedges.

I needed a hillside where I could get a nice sky in shot, so went up into a spot I used to use a lot, just outside upper Penrhyndeudraeth. It's been the background for a few shoots in recent years, everything from Airfix Quick-Build cars to Captain Scarlet aircraft, to garden-scale trains.

Full-sized train passing the shoot location, Merddin Emrys trundling past on the way to Porthmadog.

Oooh look! On the cover!

And in the mag- very nice, and very much appreciated that they wanted me for the mag.

*

A bit of a bonus; a build by Amy, my wife, to help with the project.

One of the features of the project I'd photographed, and wanted to represent on the model, was a playground. We know (from the experience of our three) that two of the best are Oxenhope...

...and Tanybwlch.

Amy wanted a go at doing some kits, and Metcalfe kits fitted the bill nicely.

Quality laser-cut kits, as usual by our experience with them.

And installed on the model; all it needs is some giddy kiddies hurling themselves down the slides with a wanton disregard for the possibility of broken legs and arms (again, from experience...)

 

Peco Rail 200: Let's All Go to the Model Village

Time to set out my stall for the Peco Rail 200 competition.  Well actually, I posted this on RMWeb, and needed to post it here too back in May, but then I got sucked into another big project, of which more in a future post. He threatens. Anyway; I’m a sucker for building a micro layout, and when I heard about this competition I thought it would give me a good project for the summer.

The board arrived nice and quickly, and is rather impressive.  Decent size, and nice thick wood.  I wanted something a bit fun, colourful, and perhaps a little silly. I also liked the idea of an entire railway (to make this effectively a self-contained, functional micro layout). 

One thing I thought of then, was a return -yet again- to my fictional Port Eden seaside resort, and a miniature railway. Port Eden has been rearing its head in my projects as a setting, off and on, since about 2006. Generally set in the 1990’s and drawing on my memories of places like Barmouth or Tenby when I was a child, Port Eden is meant to be somewhere in Western Cumbria, down at the Atomic Seaside end of the coast, south of Workington.

 

I figured a miniature railway would allow for the tight curves, but large-scale figures to allow the cramming-in of a lot of detail in a relatively small space. I’ve done this repeatedly in the past, once with 00 trains, and twice with TT/3mm stock. The 1/32nd Cakebox iteration of the miniature railway is the one above, and I figured the tight curves of one of those ‘railway in a tin’ type sets would quite easily fit the Peco board.

The next take on Port Eden after the Cakebox used much larger figures (yes, almost exclusively Dr.Who, raided from Younger Child's toybox. There’s clearly a weird multi-Doctor, multi-Companion special episode where they go to the beach in Western Cumbria instead of fighting Daleks).

The most recent iteration of Port Eden in 00, produced for (and winning) a competition for Hornby a couple of years back.

A comparison of the figure sizes, done when I started the Hornby competition. Included here because of the thoughts around the heights of figures. If I wanted to use the Dr.Who size figures this time, the height restrictions of the Peco competition would be a bit too limiting, it could at best be a diorama.

I definitely wanted a working railway, so I thought I'd be back into G-sized figures (as I went for with the Hornby competition in the end). There's some quite highly detailed figures available from some of the German manufacturers, and I thought a few of them would be better than lots of the cheaper, slightly naff figures you can get through the likes of eBay.

At this point, whilst hunting for photographs of that project, another idea reared its head... The version of the Port Eden Miniature Railway which ended up with the Dr.Who figures started life as this; a competition entry which was never completed. 

There was just a bit too much going on; a miniature railway running through a Model Village. At this point then for the Rail200 build, I decided to drop the miniature railway altogether, and focus on the model village itself as a setting for this competition layout.

This won't be the first time I've modelled a model village either; when I was at Uni in 2006, I did a whole project on a fake model village tourist attraction, but set in a "1984", "V for Vendetta" inspired dystopia- a bit of a contrast between chocolate-box villages and nostalgia, and the creeping authoritarianism of the mid-2000's (hah, glad the world got that out of it's system...). Anyway it was all a bit cliche and trite looking as a project, peering back on it from 20 years, but enjoyable in places. One of the scenes I did was the good old Model of the Model Village, Inside the Model Village which appears at real ones like Bourton on the Water. Built in a filebox, and using home-made buildings, upcycled toys and Z scale trains, I had my own little miniature dystopia inside a bigger miniature dystopia.

 

Anyway, this time for the Peco project, it's all going to be a bit happier and more colourful. What can I say, 40 year old me is more mature and less of a pretentious buffoon than 20 year old me was. And I love model villages, so this will be my chance to do something a bit more upbeat, inspired by a couple of my favourites.

The daddy of them all, Bekonscot. This does raise the question of scale again, mindyou. These custom-made trains run on G tracks, and are significantly underscale for the buildings around them (not that it's immediately obvious when you view it).

Then there's my favourite model village, Anglesey, as it was pre-Covid. The railway here was custom-built, more to scale with the surroundings.

I visited this place to document it for 'Garden Rail' magazine, and I loved it. Sadly the scale locomotives have been replaced by the regular old G scale Eurpoean-outline LGB trains on G track since, as the custom-made railway was decades old and failing. 

 

I'm stuck using Z tracks for this competition, simply because I have a ton of it in stock. It does leave me wondering what scale to do the figures though. Go large, and whilst the trains and buildings will be more to 'model village' scale, it will be a massively crammed-in scene.  But with the figures too small, the railway will look too much like miniature engineering rather than models.

Here's the initial plan anyway, and subject to my usual mission creep and changes. The track plan is a proper 'rabbit warren', of the sort which sets the hobby back decades. But then a model village feels like a good way to justify that sort of thing. The plan itself is based on one Arnold sold as a ready-made N layout back in the 1960's, minus any points. The layout doesn't need more than a single train whizzing endlessly round and round.

A quick concept pic of how I kind of want it too look; I think using mainly child figures (and only a couple at that) will help disguise how small the layout is, the compromise of not having to use tall adult figures.  It'll be set in a former walled garden to contain the scene (like the old Himley Model Village, the first such place I visited as a child). Z scale trains, home-made buildings, lots of greenery and bright colours. Enough signage to hint at the rest of the village off-scene, and the wider Port Eden tourist attraction. And an excuse to hide homages to things like "Hot Fuzz" (will there be a Big Cop in the Small Town?) and "Untitled Goose Game", which I've been playing recently with my Youngest.

 

Next job, the not inconsiderable task of finding where the box with the Z gauge track is, post house-move...

Garden Railway Saturday; Welsh Highland Railway Coach

Needing a passenger vehicle, and something quite large at that, as a test train, I turned to a favoured prototype.

During the Plague Years, we had a ride in this carriage on the Welsh Highland Heritage Railway, Porthmadog. At the time I was tempted to laser-cut one of my own, but in the end I purchased this kit (from the WHHR shop, on a later visit).

Nice multi-media kit.

Little bit fragile in places, but easy to mend.

Some lovely, good quality bits, like the bench.

Contrary to the instructions, some very nice white-metal castings to replace the laser-cut wooden parts.

Ready for painting; having constructed the coach mainly during my lunch breaks, and before shifts at work, I ended up painting it in Wales.

Bit limited in the choices of paint; it was Autumn when we were there, and naturally B&M had stripped out the spray paints in favour of more Halloween tat. Luckily I had the dregs of a can of black paint to prime it, then hand-painted the rest with tester pots.

A bit of an experiment with the roof, loo-roll soaked in  watered-down PVA.

A bit more modification to the kit, to portray open windows.

An attempt at my usual weathering technique, washes of Nuln Oil and watered-down acrylics, but the material drank it up. But then maybe it would make more sense for a carriage like this to be kept sparkling.

Photographed out in the garden at my parents house, as we still lack a garden railway... Still, as I type this, the plan is to shortly crack-on with it, weather depending...

...aaaaaand published.