Ditched!
Entry posted by KH1
566 views
Drainage ditches are not really very interesting - well about as - no even I can't commit that pun! But, they are important and I have realised that I have got mine all wrong. A couple of days ago on a military rail forum someone posted some links to a couple of original films. on British and one German and I have watched each several times over now. Strangely enough it is actually the German one which is most interesting as it must have been shot after the big break through in March 1918 and shows off loads of captured British positions. Well, amongst the mass of detail (in both films), it clearly shows the drainage ditches by the side of the track that I had already identified as a feature and had incorporated into my track bed. Only thing is, is that I went to great lengths and represented piled dirt on each side of the ditches. Silly me! The film clearly shows a very precise slit trench with the excess soil having been removed. Obvious really as the whole point would have been to provide drainage which a pile of earth would have prevented.
It is one of those things that may never have been noticed but I would have known and hopefully all you people out there (over 10,000 views now!), who see the final layout will look and say 'those ditches are correct'! Was a fairly easy matter to undo all my good work but far to late to get the vacuum out to clear up the mess so a touch up of paint and more mud will have to wait until tomorrow. Those films are a mixed blessing actually as in one go they provide far more information than all the other published sources put together - suddenly my eighteen feet is just not enough to get it all in.
Apart from messing around with ditches I have finished off the field kitchen. Again lack of information shows up again as had no idea what colour it should be. What I settled for was green for anything wood but as the main body is like a huge range stove I thought it wouldn't have been painted but stove polished like our Victorian fire places. Knowing how rusty these get if not polished regularly (which they aren't!), I coated the whole thing in ModelMates rust and then dry(ish) brushed MetalCote gun metal over the top - see what you think.
I have not gone too over the top (no, I am not punning again!), with what you could term environmental weathering i.e. mud and dust as want everything to look consistent so will deal with such things all together right at the very end - oh how I look forward to that bit!
As a complete aside, this is not the first time that German propaganda has been useful to me. When we were building or kitchen extension there was some debate with the planning department as to how big it could be (a percentage of the current building area). Now this area was defined by what was there at the time of some 1950's town planning act and our garage and out building were in contention as couldn't be proved how old they were. Well, every year the Severn Valley Railway (at the bottom of our garden), have a 1940's weekend and proudly on display was a German recce photo of the station area dated 1941 which clearly showed our house - and - garage! Didn't have anymore trouble from the planners!
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