"Prospect" - a freelance 9mm NG visit to a British Overseas Territory in the 1970s or 1980s

[ianmianmianm]

So I feel rather intimidated posting my layout here seeing some of the well recognised names on here and also the achievements of some of the novices too, and among the threads of layouts I have followed for many years/ This effort was built in a few weeks, and is scenically 4 feet long, but here goes.

 

I have been modelling since the 1980s but have been living between the UK and various overseas jobs since 2013. In most cases, modelling continued while abroad but layouts didn't make it home to the UK.

 

I have never really got into narrow gauge until 2019 when I decided to have a try at building something small and ultra-portable while I was living in Bermuda. A couple of attempts at small OO9 and freelance lines were made, and I was then diverted into making an N gauge diorama of the Bermuda Railway and an N gauge Underground layout. Ultimately it came time for me to return to blighty and the OO9 affair, lovely as it was, it was the least progressed and was scrapped. But I found myself with a couple of railcars and a loco or two which came home. The N gauge layouts, incidentally, each being 21cm by 160cm, were designed to fit in Really useful boxes and came home in two 80cm x 30cm x 30cm holdalls holding 2 boards each.  Aviation security at Bermuda LF Wade had no idea what was in the boxes so needless to say I had to go through and open them and scan them all after they'd been checked in. 

 

So I'm left with these railcars and a few buildings and bits, and come 2023 I am back in mainland UK again. I tried a couple of micro layout ideas with a South American twist but just couldn't get them to feel right. 

 

A house move last year led to them being scrapped but shortly after this, I was able to pick up a 4ft x 15 inch baseboard with a beautiful curved backscene. I wasn't looking for one but it was incredibly cheap and the seller was next door to my employer's head office where I had to visit anyway. So I picked it up one morning and loaded it into my Smart for Two (with just enough room to see the wing mirror and most of the passenger window. And then it promptly sat on its end in the hallway, unused for 10 months.

 

During this time I'd added the odd OO9 item and had also been inspired by Rob Rossington's "Turtle Bay" and Charles Insley's "Fort Whiting". Earlier this month a massive mojo-flash hit.

 

I decided I would have a crack at doing something British and island colonial and see if I could get the feeling a bit more right. Since 2016 I've lived in Malta, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and the Channel Islands and in the early 2000s travelled to Gibraltar for work several times a year so surely I could try and recreate some of that vibe of being in Britain and not in Britain at the same time?

 

Last year I also acquired a couple of 1:87 scale radio control road vehicles - a car and a bus, and with the railcars I had being Japanese Tomytec ones at 1:80, and a conversion of a Nohab Portuguese Metre Gauge bodyshell at 1:87, I estabished a rough scale protocol for the layout. Stock would be to HOe scale in either 1:87 or 1:80, although OO scale will be allowed if the prototype loading gauge was small. The layout would include minimal track, with signs of a rationalised track plan and be set in the 1970s or 1980s. Road vehicles were going to need to match the working RC ones at 1:87, so using American and European HO vehicles and some of the few British HO cars made as well. On a few islands, UK and USA car models do mix freely, and on the layout it's not immediately clear if the road are LHT or RHT.

 

Buildings were a bit more of a challenge - I played around with some US outline buildings and also some more Spanish/Latin types but in the end used predominantly OO scale buildings which I already had, and a few second hand purchases. Star finds are the Dapol flat roof shop and flat (I will need to work on that at some point as I am not sure a flat roof works in hurricane territory) which is the Indian Trinidad Roti shop. The Skaledale cricket pavilion is Mis Lilly's Jerk shack. A Fair Price models house acts as an insurance office (I am least happy with this one and its days are numbered) and a couple of faourites are a swapmeet Pola bungalow that has been Caribbeanised (that was £2) and the bottom of an Artitec apartment building facade (I trod on the top half accidentally) which became the police station frontage.  

 

Road fixtures and fittings are mainly HO but there is some OO in there - I plan to replace those phone boxes and the post box at some point.

 

So here it is - a really enjoyable build, taking OO9 in a slightly different direction, even if I am allowed to call it OO9. My next couple of builds will be stricter to real railways with accurate stock. But it's been great fun scavenging the bits for this layout, and learning to drive the radio controlled road vehicles takes the place of the loss of shunting. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited March 24 by ianmianmianm
Edit reason: typos, and uploading better video embeds

[David C]

A very convincing model of a completely fictitious prototype! Can one go on holiday there? Seriously, though, there is some very good scenic work there. It would be nice to see some more shots of the railcars ..... and any other stock as well.

 

David C

[ianmianmianm]

On 26/03/2024 at 12:06, David C said:

A very convincing model of a completely fictitious prototype! Can one go on holiday there? Seriously, though, there is some very good scenic work there. It would be nice to see some more shots of the railcars ..... and any other stock as well.

 

David C

I would right now love to be able to go on holiday there, only because I have yet to be able to find anywhere in London that can do decent Trinidadian rotis and Doubles as well as Singh's in Grand Cayman (the signs on the building are from a different Singh's though).

 

I am ramping up the railcar fleet at the moment....

 

One I am working on is this one which is from two American schoolbuses spliced back to back with the front snout removed from each. I was going to cannibalise four in total (bought at £4 each) to create something 2-car, then realised how much these actually sell for on ebay, so am hoping the untouched pair sell on there in which case if the price is achieved it will fund cost of the whole conversion. This currently sits on a Kato 4 wheel chassis, a la Park Royal Railbus, and looks reasonable but I might try and find a Bo-Bo of the right length if I see one cheap. At the moment it's the only 2-axle railcar on the roster. The splicing went a bit wrong but a Class 58 diesel grille on each side hides the bodge.

 

 

 

The Tomytec 2 car unit is a repaint of these:  

 

 

 

A better pic below on the old South American layout. The original is a single bubble car with a flat ended non-driving trailer, but the ends of each car unclip so if one end of each is swapped over, you end up with 2 identical cars.

 

 

The single car is a repaint of one of these:  it's in British Racing Green as a suggestion of an "old" livery.

 

 

The Tomytec railcars are lovely models, and a single car can just about be gotten including motorised clip-in chassis for under £60 from Plaza Japan or Hobysearch. The paint compatibility seems to be variable - the cream with red stripe happily takes an overspray without stripping, but the light blue on the 2-car was not happy to be painted on at all. 

 

The Nohab is one of two bodies I bought for a Portuguese HOm layout. I am not totally happy with the shallow roof profile for that model so decided to move one across to this project. I have an old Kato bogie chassis for it to run on which is rather rubbish so looking to track down an N gauge Budd railcar or a Greenmax chassis for it. 

 

 

 

I am going to complete the fleet with a couple of articulated "Walker" type  units from Tebee. Now that Tom is selling as digital downloads, it's better value than buying through Shapeways as , I've bought the print files and will use 2 driving cars and a central power/van car for each, but have these printed in the UK. This will sit on a Kato 109 chassis and just needs some Peco or Roco coach bogies to complete.

 

As I already had three Kato 109s and coach bogies, this was the cheapest way to grow the fleet up to having 5 or 6 units to run, without spending too much more cash. 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 1 by ianmianmianm