Correx Pizza

[Dunalastair]

Today's 'diorama-a-day' is my pizza layout. The double-sided two-scene pizza is perhaps something of a rite of passage in layout building. Whether chilled, takeaway or delivered, pizzas tend to come in cardboard boxes, which gave me the idea of using a 'Correx' base - a corrugated plastic material as used on some estate agent 'for sale' boards. At the time it was an economical material for one of my budget builds.

 

The board was bought as one of a number of rectangles - here it is with the second hand (ebay) segmental track laid out on one to see how it fits.

 

 

This 'hypercaust' arrangement used expanded foam from packaging to space an upper layer, the resulting sandwich offering better rigidity. The glue was PVA - if I had been using paper card rather than Correx, then there might have been issues with it soaking into and distorting the base.

 

 

The top platform is now in place, with cutouts for quarry, valley, tipper dock and river, and track is being laid. For once, I was organised enough to remember to install dropper feeds.

 

 

The layout is 16.5mm narrow gauge, with one side being a quarry scene. Diecast conveyor and conveyor toys just about fitted into the cutout. I had a Dinky conveyor like that to play with in the sandpit as a child - this one was bought in a sad condition but does as a static model. The Chinese front loader is rather newer, and the Landy is 3D printed. Contours were layered card covered with masking tape, and track ballasted with river sand.

 

 

The contours have now been plastered over, with a base layer of green paint. The number two side looks more like an entry to bakeoff at this stage.

 

 

A backscene spacer separated the quarry from a tipping dock on the other side. Trees came from a large rosemary bush which used to grow outside our front door. The tipper wagons were 3D printed, as was the loco, which run on a Hornby motor bogie. The bridge beams are wooden and the decking using lolly sticks.

 

 

The rockface masking the gap between the two sides ended up a rather deep red - I had just had a holiday in Bridgnorth, where the sandstone cliffs (famous for their inhabited caves) have that colour.

 

 

A 3D printed hut was provided for the workers at the tipping dock - the GPO engineer has just turned up to install a line to the quarry and the outside world.

 

 

And here is the quarry side with the scenery further developed. Static grass does tend to improve appearances, especially in larger scales - I used my homemade 'fly zapper sieve' arrangement. The tree was sprayed with fixative to keep the needles from dropping. Even the horse was printed - he has a very shiny coat.

 

 

After these photographs were taken, Correx edges were added, which improved the appearance considerably. More work was also done on the quarry edges to fill in some of the gaps. I'm not a great one for running simple layouts, and after some initial trials the layout has sat silent, even though there is some scope for shunting using the two sidings. 

 

So was the experiment successful? To a point. The central section with the track was just about rigid enough, but perhaps predictably the single layer sections at the edge tended to flex. A further sandwich layer might have improved this. 

 

The layout sits gathering dust on a high shelf and will probably be scrapped one day when I can bring myself to destroy it. In the unlikely event that anybody wanted to take it on and develop it then they would be welcome to it if they can collect from Cambridgeshire - pm me if interested.

Edited July 14, 2023 by Dunalastair