Being a bit thick I can't quite remember how to embed Youtube clips directly into a post but this link should take you to a short clip of my 7F with the Howes sound chip:
Just a couple more shots of the cottage, now that is has lighting and a few details to place it in the surroundings.
Like many of the buildings on my layouts, this one is absolutely ancient but has been tarted up a bit to keep it in use.
The summer module is getting on for four feet deep in one corner, so I need to have completed any fiddly work at the back before working forward to the front. In fact, part of the layout is still be bolted into place and once that's in, it will be hard to get to the back right corner at all. With that in mind, now has been the time to take care of the backscene.
I used a photographic backscene on the spring module, but the two I've done since then have both been painted directly onto a rigid
Things have moved quite quickly in the last couple of weeks. This tends to be the way it goes, I find - slow progress from baseboards, track laying, wiring, backscene construction, and so on, then basic landforms go in and everything speeds up (before slowing down again with the slow process of fine detailing, which can take months or years as required). Maybe it's because scenic work is very much my comfort zone as a modeller, but I tend to just dive in and get on with it, coupled with having a
I love hanging basket liner - it's the best thing ever. While I accept that it is best viewed as a basis for further texturing, rather than an end in its own right, its sufficiently grassy looking, in its natural state, to fool my eye into thinking that some definite progress is being made. Rather than endless hours faffing around with glue, paint and Kermit-coloured scatter materials, you can cover dozens of square inches of model landscape in seconds, giving that instant gratification of seein
Here's a bit more work on the scenic landforms at the northern end of the summer module. I've been doing scenery the same way, more or less, for about ten years now - establish basic contours with card or MDF profiles, fill in with expanded or extruded polystyrene where possible, and then cover the whole lot in plaster. I find it quick and easy, if messy along the way, but very satisfying. The other thing going for this method is that it produces very lightweight and dimensionally stable scenery
Onward with the building of the station platforms, which - for reasons that will become clear later on - needed to be done at this stage, before completing scenic work on the overbridge.
Way back at the start of this project I had the idea of making the buildings, station fittings etc removable, so that the layout could be swapped from one region or period to another, not being rigidly tied to the S&D. After all like many of us my interests extend beyond one prototype/time period and the
Bit more work on the bridge, following some feedback from the ever useful Captain Kernow - it does look better for those dressed stones supporting the girders, doesn't it? I also re-worked the culvert to suggest that it had been incorporated into the same works as the bridge:
(Not also bus stationed on bridge, in compliance with model railway cliches section 3, paragraph 4.2.)
I've spent a few evenings beginning to add the road overbridge at the northern end of the summer module. The pictures in Iain Rice's book on using the Wills materials proved very useful, as did a trawl of the internet - I had my doubts about a structure of this type spanning more than two tracks but soon found that it wasn't unheard of.
The construction is nothing fancy. I had some girder bridges salvaged from my old layout Wyvant, but these were all unfortunately slightly too short for the
I kicked off the ballasting on the summer module with this short stretch over the culvert, which will be difficult to access once the road bridge is in place. As mentioned elsewhere, I now use Copydex rather than PVA, which retains a degree of resilience once it has dried, so that the ballasted roadbed still has some give in it. Other than that the process is the same; sprinkle down the ballast, mist over with water, then add the dilute Copydex solution through a pipette or eye-dropper. The resu
It was good to have a close look behind the scenes at Chris Nevard's marvellous Brewhouse Quay during Railex, one of the benefits being that I saw the use of bendy MDF for the first time. I'd not knowingly seen this stuff in the flesh, but now that I had an idea what to look for, I quickly found a big pile of sheets in my local B&Q. They must have been staring me in the face every time I'd been in before, of course.
All the scenic modules on the S&D layout employ curved backscenes, w
With the glorious weather we've been having, it seems only fitting that progress on my S&D layout finally reaches the "summer" module. And now that I'm finally forced to make certain critical decisions, it's become clear that I'm no longer even pretending that this is Shillingstone, or even an attempt at "essence" thereof. I'd already made major compromises with the track layout, but the clincher has been the need to disguise the entry and exit points of the track through the backscene. I've
An impulse purchase, a souvenir of 20-odd years of living in or visiting the Netherlands, a reminder of the daily commute I did for two years on these highly reliable units, or a hint of a future modelling project? Not sure yet, but ideas are germinating...
NS Plan V electric multiple unit, newly released DCC sound equipped model by Roco. Just needs a few dead flies on the front and it will look the part...
Again nothing particularly new here, other than the odd weed or two, but I thought I'd have a go at doing a deep depth of field shot on the brook scene, with Combine ZM image stacking software. I quite like lineside pictures without trains in them - it's something about the anticipation of the train yet to come, or the quiet that comes when a train has passed. Borrowing a trick from my mate Marc Smith, I'd like to get some birdsong going on quietly in the background here, appropriate both to the
Back to the winter module, now. Currently a work in progress is the overhauling of this Superquick "Swan" pub, which is now well into its fourth decade. I would say it's been on every layout I've had, but the truth is my mother built this in the 70s to replace an even earlier "Swan" which got squashed or trod on or something. The model has had quite a bit of remedial attention over the years, having been damaged in storage, but was still in good nick. However, for a long time I've wanted to give
Nothing you haven't seen before, but a couple of slightly different views of the Spring module. Here's the entire thing, more or less, with the fascia finished (I added the vertical bits at either end) and after a coat of light blue paint. Light blue? Yes, a bit of an unconventional choice to say the least but it suits the Winter module very well and I wanted something that was both light, and also a contrast to the green used on the fascia of the American layout. Too much green would have been
I've been mucking about the backscene on the spring module a bit these last couple of days. I decided to paint an impression of middle-distance trees directly onto the original photographic backdrop, with the idea being that, placed in the right position, these will be able to soak up the shadows cast by the taller 3-d trees in the foreground.
I started by mixing up some gungey greens and reddish-green shades using almost neat acrylics, and then dabbled them onto the backscene using the roug
Being a lazy sort I've generally got by with taking photos the easy way - whack the camera on aperture priority and hope for the best, basically. However tonight I decided it was time to bite the bullet and have a fiddle with some different metering modes and manual white balance. I don't know but to my eye these photos get a lot closer to what the layout looks like in the flesh, to to speak - there's none of the pink cast present in the other pics, even though I fiddled around with the colour b
Ballasting is now complete, track weathering has begun and I've taken another look at the occupation crossing on the spring module. I'd originally placed the pillbox in front of the railway line but I found I was always moving it whenever I wanted to take a photo. The solution was to relocate it toward the background, on the other side of the line, and fill in the ground it occupied with a bit of hanging basket liner. The pillbox is now just plonked down on the existing scenery, making it easily
One of the great things about yesterday's very enjoyable RMweb member's day - due thanks to all involved for their hard work - was that I came away itching to try my hand at achieving some of the brilliant scenic effects I'd seen during the show on a number of layouts. In particular I was impressed by the textures and variety of scenic effects on Re6/6's fantastic Netherhope Halt diorama, which I kept coming back to with a view to taking mental notes.
Tonight I got out the scenic box and spe
Although I was fairly happy with the colour and painted landscape on the original winter backscene, as shown here, I eventually decided that I couldn't live with those prominent joins in the sky. Not only that, but I couldn't see an effective means of disguising them that wouldn't draw attention to itself. So - after much procrastination - I decided to redo the whole backscene before proceeding further. This wasn't as simple as it looked, as I had already begun to build up foreground and backgro
More work on the winter module - I've ballasted the track, and begun to add some of the foliage and hedges that will eventually be snow-covered. I've also done some more work on the backscene, toning down the pink a bit with some oversprays of dilute white and then a mist of Naples yellow. I then turned to one of my S&D books and found a nice Ivo Peters photo of a 7F struggling up a bank with a background of snow-covered hills, which I've used as the basis for the hill on the backscene. If I
I built this model house in my teens; it must be about 30 years old now. It was my hamfisted attempt at the Pendon method, ie scribing detail into card and then painting it in with watercolours. It has had a few additional layers of paint in the intervening years, but not much in the way of new or better details.
While it's served well on various layouts in the intervening years, the move to a more prominent position on the new module prompted me to take a look at what could be done to impro
Getting there (slowly), I hope. I bought some filler from Focus, and trowelled it over the existing plaster landscape, aiming to get a more smooth surface for the eventual application of some snow-type product. The foreground stuff has been down for 48 hours so I'm assuming that any cracks would have appeared by now.
The next job, I think, will be to ballast the track. Is it worth it, though, given that I want to create the effect of the rails almost totally covered by snow? Lat
Over the weekend I took the opportunity to tidy up the fascia of the Spring module. There has been a lighting rig in place for a year or so, but I had not added a drop-down pelmet to screen the tube since I couldn't work out an easy way to attach it in such a way that I would be able to access the light fitting for maintenance/replacement. Eventually the penny dropped (doh!) and I was able to arrange a very simple system. The next task will be to paint it a nice neutral green or grey colour.
