modern image depot on a budget.

[Highgale station]

Hello, This page is going to hopefully keep an update of a layout I am about to start building soon. The layout will be made up of 2 small baseboards,  one being a 4ftx1ft scenic section and the other a 1ftx1ft fiddle yard.

The budget of the layout will be around £100 (not including rolling stock). I have already cheated a little by re-using old baseboards I already had from a previous layout. The concept of the depot is to have a single road servicing shed in the background and to have 2 overgrown stabling sidings for locos to sit on. I hope this thread has some use to a few people or even interests someone and I look forward to starting the layout very soon.

[Sweet pea]

Sounds good, looking forward to seeing more.

[Highgale station]

Hi, today I started work on track laying. I used a mixture of Hornby and peco code 100 as it is what I had lying around. I picked up a peco streamline small point for £7.50 off ebay. 

I layed the track on top of some cork which I had bought a while back for £2. The cork was cut at 3.5mm wide strips which was just the right size to sit under the track to give the track bed a shoulder.

 

 

 

I currently have the baseboards underneath my main 'roundy' layout which is why the pictures are a bit dark in some places. This will soon be fixed once I have got some wood or foamboard for a fascia and some backscenes, then I can add lights for the layout. Does anyone have any suggestions for lighting options for the layout? I was thinking of led stips but I don't know if they will work , any help will be appreciated. 

 

Today I also started a few of the details for the layout.

 

So I have 3d printed some rawie style buffer stops:

 

I think these printed rather well so I decided to paint them as obvioudly blue is not the correct colour.

 

 

 

so I started the painting process by painting the buffers with a Tamiya red acrylic. These required 3 coats of paint to make them look good.

 

 

Next I painted the buffers with its white stripe by masking off a line abd painting it with white humbrol acrylic paint.

 

This is the final result and I think they came out really good. not as good as accurascales offerings but good enough.

 

Finally I started some work on a diesel storage tank.

This was made out of an old round container and some sprue of of an old airfix kit. This was all dpray painted a matte black.

 

I then made the well for the tank to sit in. This was made out of some scrap foam board which was cut to make a base and the I glue 1cm strips to make walls to surround the tanks. 

 

 

Now I got some off cut/ scrap brick sheeting which I cut to cover the 1cm tall walls.

 

 

then I gave the inside a paint and placed the tank inside.

 

 

The tank is not quite finished yet but I think its a good start.

[47137]

On 07/10/2020 at 23:35, Highgale station said:

I currently have the baseboards underneath my main 'roundy' layout which is why the pictures are a bit dark in some places. This will soon be fixed once I have got some wood or foamboard for a fascia and some backscenes, then I can add lights for the layout. Does anyone have any suggestions for lighting options for the layout? I was thinking of led stips but I don't know if they will work , any help will be appreciated. 

 

I have used LED tapes for my last three layouts and they all worked out well. I suggest you put in three parallel tapes: two cool white and one warm white. Put the tapes as far forward as you can, ideally three or four inches in front of the modelled area, to make the lighting effects look natural. Buy a couple of drill speed controller modules to use as dimmers. Connect one controller to the two cool white tapes, and the second controller to the warm white tape. This will be functionally much the same as I have done for my present layout project, but reduced from four sets of LEDs to three for the smaller size of a micro. The LEDs will give you an excellent spread of light - there are numerous light sources, and so buildings and trees near the backscene won't cast peculiar shadows. Hope this helps.

 

-Richard.

 

[Highgale station]

On 09/10/2020 at 15:00, 47137 said:

 

I have used LED tapes for my last three layouts and they all worked out well. I suggest you put in three parallel tapes: two cool white and one warm white. Put the tapes as far forward as you can, ideally three or four inches in front of the modelled area, to make the lighting effects look natural. Buy a couple of drill speed controller modules to use as dimmers. Connect one controller to the two cool white tapes, and the second controller to the warm white tape. This will be functionally much the same as I have done for my present layout project, but reduced from four sets of LEDs to three for the smaller size of a micro. The LEDs will give you an excellent spread of light - there are numerous light sources, and so buildings and trees near the backscene won't cast peculiar shadows. Hope this helps.

 

-Richard.

 

Hi Richard,

Thank you so much! this is very helpful to know, I will have to put in an order for the leds and dimmers soon.

Many thanks Joe

[Highgale station]

Hi all, over the past two days I have been doing more on the layout.

 

As  forgot to mention in the last update I have also fitted a surface mounted point motor which is going to be hidden by a bridge.

 

1st of all I started with the bridge to cover the exit of the layout which leads to the fiddle yard. So far I have only made the bare shell of the bridge with no paint or brick sheet. 

The bridge has been made out 5mm foamboard which is a good material as it is light (so it wont add too much weight to the layout and is cheap. The bridge was made at an angle so the fiddle yard would be less visible from different angles. 

 

 

Next up I decided that to continue in the layouts build I would have to make the backscenes up, so I did. I made the backscenes out of 5mm foamboard. These were all cut at a 16cm height. This was then all glued to the baseboards using hot glue.

 

 

I then test fitted the bridge in place which fitted really good. Its certainly not my finest pieces of work but in the end it will look good.(I hope)

 

 

I added a printable backscene from railwaymodellers.com.

This did not come out that great in my opinion but with some blending of scenery and weathering I hope it will come out reasonably well.

An example of me starting to blend in the backscene is by putting a fence against it to make it look like the depot has ended. And I also started on the layouts 1st scenic bits.

 

The image above is just after I re-flocked some trees so the glue is still drying which makes them look pretty bad but in the flesh they look nice.

 

Thanks for reading this update and any feedback is very welcome.

 

 

[Highgale station]

Hello again, Its been a while.

I have done quite a lot of work to this layout since the last post.

1. i have 3d printed half of my loco shed 

2. i have ballasted 

3.I started to place scatter

Since this photo i have Started to do the static grass and place bushes onto the layout. The Bushes are made up of two methods 1. steel wool with flock added to the top and 2. clump foliage. I also placed down a few flowers and different coloured flock onto the grass to make the grass more interesting and more lifelike. Another thing done to the layout was the weathering of the track, i dry brushed the track with Humrol weathering powders which created a nice mix of oil spills and general track dirt. I especially dirtied up the oil transfer pipe as that would be a main place for oil build up and dirt.

 

 

The bridge was a main point of work recently as the rest of the layout looks decent but the bridge was letting down the right hand side of the layout.

I started by printing some brick papers which i had bought a while ago. I then cut and glued on the papers and gave a bit a weather over the top of the bridge entrances.

I am happy with bridge for the moment but i will eventually redo the bridge with embossed plastic sheet as i believe it looks better.

Lastly for this update i started to paint the concrete hard standing using standard cheap poster paint. This was applied with a sponge as it gives a nice stippled effect rather than a false brush effect. This photo is also a nice opportunity to see an overview of the layout, as you could probably tell by now the layout is really small but i am happy with what i am achieving  in the small space. There are always room for improvement so if you have any advice or comments for me please feel free to let me know. Thanks for reading .

ps: sorry for the general clutter in some of the pics i am a messy worker lol.