ed1234

I saw this image on Reddit's UK trains board today, and thought of this layout. Admittedly it's a modern image and of a very very small (relatively speaking!) corner of what you're modelling, but I also know that all modellers can take something out of any image, no matter how obscure, so I hope it's of some use and interest.

What a stunning result James - the amount of nerve and effort to take a pristine model (and such a finely tooled one) and deliberately turn it into something so grotty and grimy.... beautifully done. Would love to see some shots of it on a layout one day.

Hi Neill, welcome to the forum! Just in relation to older images, unfortunately there was an outage a year or so ago which resulted in the loss (unfortunately irretrievable, at least as far as the forums are concerned) of many of the older hosted images. That is probably why you're struggling to view links (images, at least) from the older posts. Hope this helps.

In all my many years of following this wonderful layout, I think this track plan is the first time I have realised that the layout is a U shape. Up to this point I always assumed the track that leads to the fiddle yard was positioned just before the station (i.e. the bridge at the neck of the station is the same as the one that, in reality, covers the fiddle entrance). Having seen the plan, it's obvious these bridges are different - not least the number of tracks. But in five or more years my brain has never connected the dots... What's for pudding, nurse?

Everything's glossy in Wales - it never stops raining 😀

@Philou, many thanks for the update. I look forward to seeing your layout progress. Mine resides still in my head and some early 3D sketches I did, pending life to get to a point where it's more amenable to layout construction.

The PTFE tape that plumbers use also makes for good cloth - it's super thin, slightly stretchy (so you can make quite good tarpaulins), creases in a reasonably scale-accurate way, can be painted and is just slightly tacky so sticks to things by itself long enough for glue to affix it permanently. But it works much better for draped materials than it does for flat materials - I'd not want to try and make a shirt out of it!

Right, so that's the prototype image. Can we have a picture of the model now please?

I suppose this is a prototype / period question: today, the equivalent of this scene would have a ten foot high metal fence between the locomotive and the two members of the public having a chat in the background, with 'Danger of death' notices everywhere and probably razor wire on top. All sensible precautions of course to keep the soft squishy humans away from the heavy metal locomotives. But in the 1930s, were railway yards really as 'open' as depicted here? Or is this modeller's licence, and the 'real' 1930s LM would have a wire fence or similar between railway and public road? I appreciate no one-size-fits-all answer, and this is a dockside scene which might have different rules (both for railway safety and public access), but just curious.

Are there any pigeon carrying vans in LM's fleet, or was that not something GWR went in for? I confess it's not my era, though I have read the parliamentary laments in Hansard when it was proposed that BR discontinue the service in the late 1970s.

Easiest way of avoiding modelling the birds is modelling the aviary door in the open position!

Given the cottage occupant is clearly a green-fingered soul (judging by their superbly kept veg garden in the back), I look forward to seeing what is going to be planted in the front garden. A rambling rose, to break up the expanse of brick? A beautiful bush of Japanese knotweed, to give the next buyer something to worry about?

This angle will always be one of my favourite examples of how clever modelling can really draw the eye away from 'faults' (and by 'fault' I don't mean something not done well/properly, I mean something that draws the eye away from the scene and throws the 'it's a model!' switch in all our brains). In this case, there are so many things to draw the eye away from the fact that the world ends after the second coach, and falls away to the great abyss of carpet below, that you have spend a long time looking before you notice that tiny gap behind the second coach. The boy and dad/grandad on the bridge, the way the wire fence swoops up to meet the bridge brickwork (drawing the eye), the tuft of hill on the other side of the bridge..... and then when your eye is 'bored' with all that, the track curving off to the right throws the 'I wonder where that goes' switch... (And I haven't even mentioned the train itself yet...) Anyway, that's a lot of words to say: great shot.

Prototype question, out of curiosity: does anyone know the purpose of the long concrete 'supports' behind the buffer stops in these pictures? They seem rather too 'beefy' for simply supporting the buffers.

As a photographer, might a camera lens blower (the sort in a rocket shape) be worth a try for agitating dust without blowing too hard? I'm surprised nobody has invented a 'static grass applicator in reverse' that you can hover over scenery to attract fine dust without exerting a suction force like an actual vacuum, though I'm sure there's a good physics reason why that's not possible...