Playing catch-up on old projects, where the blogging got sidelined by the house move. This was a project for Hornby, for the Collectors Club. I was going through a bit of a layout design phase, re-visiting projects I'd done in the Lockdowns for Railway Modeller, though in a bit more detail and with added model making.
Pensnett, in Dudley, West Mids, is home to a large trading estate of the 'tin shed' variety. Back in the 60's it had an internal railway line, which had been trimmed back to a coal yard/delivery point for bottled water by the time I was growing up in the 1990's. I thought I'd do a re-imagining of it as if the original internal network had survived into the early 1990's.
For real-world inspiration, I turned to the Balm Road Branch of the preserved Middleton Railway in Leeds...
...and the old Workington Docks lines.
All that's left of the original line at Pensnett is the preserved, plinthed shunter (a couple of the other locomotives survive as well elsewhere).
The idea was a simple couple of dioramas, one for a corner of the layout, one for the exchange sidings with British Rail. Scrap materials for the scenics, and for the buildings I planned to use the old Town and Country range Hornby sold in the late 80's/early 90's. This was meant to be a 'moving on from the trainset' type scheme, so I thought I wouldn't modify the buildings too much.
Foamboard scenery, with some packing foam for the landforms.
Ballast was the foam underlay that Hornby used to sell (for environmental reasons, I gather that this is being phased out these days, but I had a load leftover from previous shoots.
The road surfaces and building surrounds were sprayed with textured paint, though in hindsight it was too coarse a texture. Sculpted filler for the other landforms.
Another glamorous photoshoot on the drive...
I was using models effectively straight out of the box; I'd acquired one of the recently-released Ruston 88ds models (to represent the real one once at Pensnett), but couldn't bring myself to repaint the rather nice Rowntrees livery just for this project.
It is, if anything, too nice and modern a model for the lo-fi 90's-era stock and buildings.
Ditto for the Sentinel.
Some properly retro models used for the exchange sidings scenes. An old Class 25...
...and one of the shunters I kit-bashed from the Barclays for the £100 Layout build.
It was a project with a lot of compromises, and I could have done with some buildings on the backscene, so it wasn't quite so flat and open. But it did the job, and planted the idea for a related project for a later article (more on that coming soon).
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