Blog- Maurice's Blog - Building Carcasses for Coevordsekade

RSS Fetcher · April 4, 2015

So the picture of the little scene got mentioned on the Markenburg Facebook page! It was not placed in their 3rd birthday competition!!

However, this is the only part of the layout that is anywhere near complete.... having taken the risk of putting down the buffer-ends of the shunt head and the two sidings before doing the point work on the main board. The cat is out of the bag with the following picture.

By the way the shunt head has my 'trademark' 30ft radius... something I try to include in all my layouts, whatever the scale! I need to get a better return on the investment in a 30ft radius curve purchased for the construction of my S Scale Country Boards.

A start has been made on the carcasses for the buildings along the back of the layout. These are made from foam board to keep the weight down and will be little more than scenery flats in the middle section but with some greater depth to the righthand end to balance the Markenburg building at the lefthand end.

This general view taken relatively early in the process, shows the backs of several buildings cut out. There are two large buildings to go in the gap in front of the track plan on the table behind the baseboard and more at the righthand end. I don't find foam board the easiest material to work with, but it the best way to make light-weight cores for the structures and is surprising strong when all glued up. The buildings will have a long rear panel that will go down the back of the baseboard to help hold them on place. They will travel in a plastic box, gable ends of several buildings interlocking to save space.

Working on black material with the window light the wrong way round makes things more difficult.... but at least the small amount of sun over recent days is charging my radio... its solar panel being tilted for best collection!

This shows the righthand end in rather more detail. The window apertures cut out of the house front are carefully matched to the bonding on the brick papers so that I don't end up with some funny brick sizes. This is easy on the simple bonds, but will be more difficult to get right on the header a stretcher bonds on some buildings. The buildings will all be 'blind' with no interior details. That is the reason for using black foam board, to darken the insides. They will have glazed windows... I might even use real glass ... but net curtains, and shutters, both internal and external will help deceive the eye as to what is behind them.

.... and here is the general working setup, with detailed drawings, the original cereal packet cutouts for checking the size and shapes. Some of these have sketches of the design but I need the get out the images captured from Google Earth that provided the original inspiration before starting on the detailed work.

More brick paper has been ordered from the Netherlands so, once the carcasses are finished, I will have to wait for these supplies to arrive before progress can be made with all the detailing.

I must get on with this job in the day light!

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