A Photoplank for "Welsh Pony"

Having made the model of "Welsh Pony", I wanted to get some pics of it, and with lockdown keeping me from starting construction on the garden railway at the in-laws, I ended up raiding the woodpile to quickly knock-up a photoplank.

A bit of rudimentary carpentry, a bit of a bodge but then I was struggling to get hold of wood.

45mm gauge takes up a lot of room... especially when you're creating something that needs to fit and store in a box.

The printer was out of action, but luckily I had a folder full of brick paper and things created way back for the Britannia Model Village project.

I needed a cliff-face, and ended up creating one with some packing paper...

...tester-pot paints...

...and PVA.

Trees were trickier, but we had a few of these slightly naff Christmas decorations up in the loft which had been bought to be background props for the comics.  They'd need a quick respray.

I was struggling for figures, to this size, but had a couple I thought I could rebuild a bit for the pics.

The coaches were going to be tricky, but a raid of the loft produced these three cabooses (cabeese?) from Echo Toys sets, the same sets which had already donated parts for "Welsh Pony" itself.

I wanted three fairly generic, vaguely Ffestiniog coaches (they'd be out of focus in the background) so thought card and scrap acrylic from CD cases would to the trick for the bodies.

Tudor half-timbered carriages.

Making the ends and the chassis from more scrap wood.

On the Echo Toys chassis; designed to be removable as I wanted the chassis for re-use again in the future.

Unable to leave the house, I needed to improv a way of trying to get a decent background, so these rather precarious legs were built.

Shame about the house wall on the right.

USB-driven humidifiers for steam effects.

The lamps are battery-powered Sylvanian Families items, picked up clearance at TK Maxx the year before.

I wasn sort-of happy with the night shoot, it felt like it would have worked better with a nicer background mindyou.

The next morning it was out in the garden for some shots.

Attempt at a long-exposure pic, towing the loco with the camera on a flat wagon.

This is the sort of thing I wanted for the actual garden railway.

I think the daylight shots actually worked better.  And it was a lot of a bodge, but it did what it needed to do, with a nicely distracting lockdown project.  The photoplank though was a bit limited in what angles it could provide (being created specifically for this project), so I planned a bit for a rebuild, of which more in a future post...