BRM Magazine; In Suburbia (00 scale houses)

Another piece in British Railway Modeller; this time, it was kits for a pair of of the redesigned terrace houses.

Looking for inspiration literally close to home; I'll admit to not really looking at our street much, but once I had, I started spotting the myriad of differences and details. If anything, I thought I'd need to hold myself back with what details I included

A lot of parts in the kit, but well laid-out, and lovely clear instructions.

Lets go through the Bay Window...

Modifications to the kit, adding a basement storey and modifying the roof over the bay windows.

Raising the ground texture.

The kits came with paper to roll into chimneypots, but being less patient (and wanting to inject a little variety, to better match my own street) I went for various lengths and thicknesses of plastic rods, and even old lollipop sticks, coloured with permanent markers.

I had a vision in my mind of how I wanted the header pics to look, and planned on a diorama. I probably should have just shot the houses against a white background, as they were, but I've got into a habit of doing these big, over the top scenes now. In my defence, it can be used in other pics and as a backdrop in other articles though.

Installing the houses.

The little details would make or break the scene... these are nice, if ridiculously fiddly, flowerpots by the German firm of Busch. The plastic plants to go with them are even fiddlier, so I compromised on scenic scatter and Katy Sue Designs flowers.

Ah yes, the lighting; we'll come back to that, but sufficed to say a few sets of old, cheap battery Christmas lights ended up being used.

More interior details; again, this will be revealed what-for as well.

Going mad with the scenic scatter for an overgrown garden, but the basement window is in there somewhere. In hindsight I could have done this feature on a different house where it would be more visible, but I suppose it's nice having a hidden detail in there somewhere.

We're getting to the time of year again where you can't guarantee decent natural light when you need it, so the final pics were shot somewhat hurriedly before work one morning when it was still gloomy outside.

The side of the diorama that isn't on the article, but will appear in a future one.

So, the lighting; this was a bit of a cock-up with the project on my part. The Editor wanted me to have a separate part of the article all about including working street lights, but I didn't have the right power source to run them before the deadline hit. It's going to be a job for Future Ben, but at least the houses are rigged up with lights and and impression of interiors.

Emergency Water Supplies sign in Carlisle, photographed over the summer. Amy went to some trouble whilst we were at Uni to record the many surviving WW2-era signs around the place, and with this diorama partly inspired by where we lived in Carlisle...

...it seemed appropriate to include one on the street.

And here we have it, the finished diorama. The idea was to have 4 contrasting houses, all basically the same but with modified details, and each with details and figures that represented a different generation living inside.

This is effectively our house, with the neat little box hedge arrangement we inherited when we moved in.

One house on the end with an older couple living there (nice garden and mature tree, but the greenery is a little out of control to show the owners are getting on a bit and can't maybe keep up to the maintainance). Distinguished Gent and his dog leaving the house.

Overgrown garden in the empty, for-sale house next door. And look, a same-sex couple looking to move in. Who says we modellers are stuck in the past? I thought it was a nice subtle detail to include when the figures turned up in a second-hand box.

And the house belonging to the young family. A bonkers mess of colour and chaos (been there, albeit some years ago now). Well it wouldn't be a Benjy project without the inclusion of a gratuitous beachball, something that's become a staple of the summer-themed projects this year. Actually this scene was directly inspired by one of our neighbours who was hosting The Dreaded Five-Year-Old Girls Birthday Party. Ah yes, I remember the chaos when we hosted parties for our kids, and wondering how it was time passed so slowly when you were surrounded by screaming and shrieking 6 year old kids.

Again, little details hidden in the scene for people to spot, based on real life, like the boy trying to pop the birthday-girl's balloon.

And here it is, on the page.

The team at BRM have done an excellent job, as ever, with the design work.

 

Let's All Go To The Model Village; Part Two. Making and Finishing

Previously on... Ben Struggles To Fit In Yet Another Project This Summer.  

The Peco Rail 200 Competition, to build a model-railway on a set-sized, laser-cut baseboard. It seemed such a good idea back in May, then Summer was a bit manic. There was a lot of work for British Railway Modelling magazine, some for Hornby, and a lot of family drama. It was to the point that the glue was literally still drying as I took the final pictures, the day before the deadline.

Just to recap, here's the plan.

The height restriction of having it no more than 14cm high above the baseboard meant a struggle to fit this in, modelling in a large scale, so I cut down into the frame. It was still going to be a tight fit, even using the sharply-curved Rokuhan tracks.

Cutting out the trackbed would be a quick and easy job... until the electric jigsaw died. And so it became a longer job, with the trusty coping saw.

Testing the clearances with some stock, and establishing the ground levels.

Starting planning where the paths would go.

For the surrounding walls of the old garden, I turned to embossed dolls-house brick paper, attached to the walls with double-sided tape.

To disguise the trackplan a bit, I decided to employ lots of tunnels and bridges. 

To further emphasise the fact this was a model village, I wanted to replicate this culvert-formed tunnel from Anglesey Model Village.

I had some of this ribbed piping, unused from when we installed the new sink.

Does the trick nicely, another detail that makes it clear this isn't a Z scale layout, but a larger scale layout with smaller trains.

The pond was black paint with some Koi Carp done with acrylic, then a layer of 1mm clear perspex on top. The landforms were then done with carved foam, then a bit of filler to create cliff faces. Tunnels from N gauge platform edging, and a bit of stone-effect plasticard.

For ornate railings, having discovered the intended model-ship brass railings would be way too pricey, I went for these 1/12th scale plastic dolls-house railings. Too tall as they came, they could be cut-down nicely for waist-high for the figures, with some lower railings for the borders.

Coming together nicely in this shot, with static grass sheet, some longer-fibre sheet, and a mix of whatever trees, shrubs, and bushes I could find in the scenery boxes. Flowers scattered over the bushes were from Katy Sue Designs.

Buildings needed to be done quickly- I didn't have time to do 'proper' buildings, plus they needed to look like the slightly flat-textured structures you actually get in some model villages, relatively simple structures. I ended up designing nets on the computer, and filling them in with downloaded brick and stone texture sheets, and some windows and doors from online stock sites.

Assembled around blocks of Balsa wood, with mountboard-card roof pieces.

For the trains, I'd be using the standard Rokuhan 'Shorty' stock, on their unmotorised, plastic display chassis.

A bit of a repaint into a slightly more British livery.

Same for the single-unit railcar, which will eventually run on the layout.

For the figures, I did think about re-using some of the old figures from the last go at Port Eden, the Miniature Railway end of the attraction. But I wanted something a little more 'family' in tone.

After searching around, I settled on these from the Schliech range; they had quite a few kid figures. I thought using the smaller children would help with the scale, and the limited available height of the scene. The vaguely Germanic looks and oddly styled/coloured clothing though would play into the nominally mid-1990's era of the Port Eden project.

Some of them would need a bit of cutting and re-modelling. I can see what they were going for, with 'girl feeding a carrot to her pony', but said vegetable looked a little... suggestive.

Carving away the carrot left a slightly-odd shape, disguised though with the balloons and a teddy. Someone has clearly been doing well on the arcade games.

It had all been looking a bit monochrome, but adding some brightly coloured figures helped, and the balloons added a kitsch, colourful, playful atmosphere. The star-shaped ones are chunky clothing buttons glued back-to-back, then large one here is a bouncy-ball, with the strings from paperclips.

I was only able to get hold of one adult figure in time. Ah, the weary, thousand-yard stare of the parent who's had to indulge their offspring on a trip to the fairground, and help carry and hold their tat..

The bridge over the middle of the scene limited the height, so as an experiment (and to disguise her from her identical counterpart a few inches away), Blondie here was remodelled to be kneeling down. Note the painfully-90's metallic silver skirt too.

These two ended up being the centrepiece of the layout; there's also a little boy, but his expression was frankly a bit haunting, so he's on the edge of the scene, partly hidden by a hedge. Well, I dragged my three foster-daughters around enough places like this when they were little...

Here's the finished layout; as I said at the start, the glue and paint was still drying at this stage, but I'd run out of time for submitting the final photographs. 

Just to prove it's within the 14cm height!

And that was it, done enough to enter the competition, with 24 hours to spare.

And just to see how it looks compared to the concept sketch...

So, the big question; am I happy with it? Pretty much. It's something a bit different from the other competition entries I've seen. It's a shame it ended up a bit rushed, but I had to prioritise paid work and family. Looking at it another way though, it means I nailed a working micro layout in about a fortnight of evenings and late nights. Plus, building it has scratched a metaphorical itch. I might end up upgrading it after the competition, add a few more details and figures, but overall, yeah, pretty happy with it.