During my enforced rest from vigorous carpentry I decided it might be a good idea to make a cardboard mock up of Bosmelin so I could get some idea of what the scenery might look. Of course such a course of action is recommended by most layout designers and often mentioned by the more skilled builders. Of course like most people I initially omitted this step and ploughed on with wood cutting and baseboard building.

But I have to say having effectively been forced into making a mock up I have learnt how useful it is. I decided on quarter scale which has proven about right. For a smaller layout than Bosmelin one third might be tried.

I didn’t make each of the model baseboards separately but split the scenic front of layout into 3 parts. Using Anyrail I printed the track plan off 1:4 and used this to create the card track beds. I then used polystyrene to form the land and duly covered this with plaster bandage before finally finishing with an interior filler to which I added a dollop of PVA. Once dry I painted the surface with emulsion from some tester pots I bought cheaply in Wickes when the colour range changed. And here’s a couple more pictures showing the process to this point.

mde

So having produced what I thought was a lovely model of a model I stood back to admire my handicraft.

However, something was not quite right. I had made the backs of some of the boards too high. This meant that the landscape was too high and consequently too steep. Major surgery ensued with the backs being cut down and large chunks of the land being removed.

I was now presented with another problem as the revised profiles were no longer ‘right.’ To gain sufficient height in the land the boards needed to be deeper. Fortunately the overall design allowed for this as I had always intended to have a proper backdrop to the layout. That is to say a three dimensional perspective driven backscene rather than a flat “D one.

I have had Paul Bambrick’s book ‘Creating a Backscene’ for a while and referred to this to see what was possible. And here I will end this blog post and will describe the next stages of MiniBos in the next post.

In the meantime if you are interested in scenic backscenes you might enjoy a look at Paul Bambrick’s website: http://bambrickstudio.co.uk I do think that the backscene is the next ‘big thing’ in the scenic railway modelling.

See you soon!

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