Not much happening for the last three weeks since we've been away, but the jet-lag had receded sufficient by Sunday that it was possible to do some modelling without falling asleep.

These are the abutments and central pillar for my attenuated Norwood Road bridge. It's been kind of a pain, since the only reference pics I found are about 400 pixels wide, but I've been able to find a few details captured in other pictures taken by heroic folk leaning over the bridge to spot some choice loco or other. As far as I can tell, the structure is made from blue engineering brick, so I started off with the Scalescenes dark blue brick sheet - it's not really the right colour, too pristine, but I thought it'd probably easier to weather that than re-colour their dark brown brick.

The abutments and pillar have 1mm mount board carcasses build to slip neatly over the existing foamcard abutments seen in this earlier entry. Following tips from Ben A and John Teal (and after a false start using thin card and Pritt-stick) I printed the Scalescenes sheet onto an A4 sticky label. This was fun, easy to wrap around the carcasses, and seems to have stuck really well. I had to take one sheet off after I realised I had the height wrong, and it didn't really want to go  As a result I'm fairly confident they'll stay put in the longer term. All the edges are tucked under so they'll be prevented from peeling loose when the carcasses are stuck to the foamcard structures.

The central pillar was a bit more complicated and needed a curved shape. I formed some 0.5mm styrene sheet around a wooden spoon with hot water to get a partial curve, and attached it with some very potent double-sided adhesive film. This is like a big sheet of double-sided tape which you can cut to size - I got it on recommendation from the local art shop, seems pretty good so far. Naturally I got the wrapper slightly mis-aligned, but when I tried to reposition it the mount board started to delaminate instead, so I gave up and trimmed it to fit. Any remaining bad bits will be hidden by the bridge girder and deck, I think.

I also made the mistake of setting the "step" height a bit low, so the brick paper is cut ~3mm taller than the styrene, and is reinforced with a slip of 0.25mm styrene inserted from the inside - fiddly stuff. The rounded capstone (or whatever it is) I carved from balsa wood, then sealed with thin superglue and sanded smooth. Very satisfying job, that was.It sort of sits just inside the brick paper wrapper, with a bit of gesso needed to fill in the joint at the back. Could be neater, but the shape looks about right.

Here's a picture of the bits in place temporarily (before I'd painted the capstone). I recoloured the papers quite thoroughly with MIG "Dark Mud" and "Industrial City Dirt", plus washes of dark brown paint, pale grey for blooms, and coloured pencils to add some variation in hue. It looks a might redder in the pictures than I think it is in real life, but hopefully you get the idea. It still needs a coat of varnish to seal it, since it's prone to rubbing.

The graffiti on the left side (visible in the header image) is a truncated version of the squared "OK" seen on the prototype - I don't have enough depth in the bridge for all of it. The graffiti on the right is my little tribute to a famous piece of local graffiti which was more-or-less a shrine to Ian Curtis and remained in Wellington for nearly thirty years before the council saw fit to paint it out last year. It has since been restored and the council are apparently going to leave it alone I don't like graffiti generally - too much like cats peeing in corners - but I think this graffito is slightly different and deserves a bit of respect.

All in all it was an interesting learning exercise - I haven't done any card buildings since failing to build some Superquick houses as a teenager. I like the Scalescenes sheets, but I'm not sure if I'm a convert yet. It's fun and quick to put things together, but it's also easy to stuff things up, and there's no facility to cut back/fill/sand for shape, or strip paint and start again, which you do have with plastic and metal. We'll see how the depot end of the layout (which is a work-in-progress in styrene) comes out so I can compare and contrast.