Its been far too long since I managed to do any modelling. Unfortunately this is mainly due to my health at the moment, its been up and down but I appear to be on the mend and after a nice energy drink today I felt up to doing some of the tasks I had set myself last time.

One thing that I wanted to do was to find a quicker way of scratchbuilding structures out of plasticard. I found that laminating things added another level of complication for me and I wanted to try simpler methods. Luckily my dad has been buying me several Oxford Omnibus Bedford OB's (he loves older buses and keeps telling me that they are on a trip from the UK to the Limousin...). He also bought me a Morris Minor from the same range. These are lovelly vehicles but what do they have to do with modelling a building from scratch...

Well the boxes that they come in are clear plastic and almost perfectly square. With a little modification I can use these as the basis for some slaters plasticard bricks to create a building in quicker time than if I were laminating it using the older method. I will still use the older method because these boxes are not always going to fit, but at least for the next building I have a rough idea of how it will work. The picture below shows how the box fits with the current building (in the making). I scrounged the window frames from a SAI kit (and luckily because the box is clear it means no need for glazing.

Talking of the SAI kit I constructed one of the 3 houses (the glue made me feel weird so I called it a day after the one). It looks pretty nice and just needs the drain pipes to be added to make it complete. A series of 3 of them will be going on the hill with a small road leading to them. I will need to cut into the hill to make them sit flat.

When I am doing the road I will relay the road in the centre of the town where it is currently looking quite poor. I took up some of it today and put some supporting walls in but I am not happy with all of them and will relay these later.

I have also been making some Woodland Scenics trees. They are not the best efforts of mine but they will do for the background of the forest and I shall either purchase of construct some higher quality trees for the foreground. I left them on the platform before I place them.

And finally on ebay at the moment the Del Prado railcars seem to be going for slightly cheaper than they were and I got a relatively cheap one. I was going to make a trailer car out of it but I have neither the knowledge now the expertese to do it justice right now so I think I will obtain another Tomix Chassis from Japan and use that to make another railcar. I might consider reliverying it as this particular railcar does not have the best paint job.