martink

Progress on Penzance is continuing in fits and starts. The backscene is now done, as well as the basic ground cover. The next steps are adding the beach sand and installing the buildings. Then it will finally be time to get it all running properly and make a new batch of trains. The layout will share a lot with Dauntsey Lock, but there needs to be a lot of extra pre-grouping stock and the Edwardian road vehicles. The basic hills were generated by an AI tool called Canvas, the overall town is a combination of snapshots from several drone videos, small scenes with roads are from a combination of Google Earth, Paint and a little program of my own that places rows of houses with scaling and perspective. All of that was followed with a lot of editing in Paint and GIMP to tidy everything up.

I believe the owner retired it and put it into storage about 5 years ago, as after twenty-something shows it was starting to have a few issues.

Maybe when it, or a derivative, develops into a finished product. It is certainly much more of an option for small layouts like mine.

That is one of the limitations of the beta software - the image is a fixed 4096 x 2048 pixels in size. I like to use 150 DPI for mine, which works out to 27 inches. With a bit of fiddling around, you can draw the backscene in sections, one 2-foot panel at a time. You can get the edge of each new section to be fairly similar to the last, but not quite identical. They can then be merged by hand with a bit of editing. Penzance, for example, is 6 feet long and uses 3 of those sections.

My current project is a T Gauge model of Penzance, set in 1913. For obvious reasons, making the backscene for this layout will be a challenge. I am trying out a piece of free software called NVidia Canvas. This lets the user paint a very rough outline of a landscape, which it then turns into a full photographic scene based on one of several template photos. The software is still a Beta test version and has a huge number of limitations, but it is marginally useful already and has the potential to be very handy indeed. While free to download and use, it does require a recent NVidia graphics card. I have used it to shape the basic terrain, the hills behind the town, as generic English farmland and light forest. The plan is to cut and paste individual buildings and rows of terraces from other sources, mainly drone videos taken from suitable viewpoints, and build up a complete town scene. The pics here are of the first rough draft, in black and white and still not quite the right shape. We will see how this works out.

Thanks. T Gauge really does make for some interesting opportunities, most of which are simply not practicable in the more popular scales. Acres of empty grassland could be another metric! Penzance is certainly my most ambitious project to date, building on experience and lessons learned from the earlier ones. I have, alas, had to distort more aspects of the model than I would like in order to make everything come together. Limitations of the track geometry and especially the track-to-track spacing means that the whole station area is significantly wider than the prototype, to the point of having to widen the station building and overall roof. Even then I can still only fit one siding between the platform roads instead of two. Most models of Penzance choose a later period with 4 platform faces, but I went for the earlier option so as to include the wooden approach viaduct and MPD. It also pushes the operational aspect further than before, with enough flexibility and complexity that it does not have to be solely an automatic layout. I may end up adding a semi-manual control option as a future project, with the automation mainly limited to handling the next signal box up the line (i.e. the storage loop). Reactions to the scale and drive system vary enormously, with the lack of proper wheels and track being the big obstacle for many. I also get a lot of "too small for me" comments, although since I use much simpler models it actually works out to about the same amount of fiddliness per square inch. The tiny size doesn't really come across in photos and videos, so it tends to just look like a very rough and ready piece of modelling. At exhibitions, where people see it for real and at the proper distance, the reactions tend to be very different. Some viewers are completely blown away, and there are always a few that keep coming back around to see again and again. I enjoy watching the expressions on peoples' faces at shows when they see one for the first time. Priceless!

Your comment isn't actually all that far off, but more Kingscene than Bilteezi. I couldn't find any usable pictures of Edwardian-era shops (well, one hardware store when I needed a mixed couple of dozen), and didn't want to tackle the street furniture part, but there are plenty of card models of shops of a generation later, so the shopfronts are taken from pictures of models. Since the largest is about 9mm x 5mm, all you really see at a distance is a riot of colours. That row of shops is almost freelance anyway, since I had to significantly distort that part of the street geometry. Albert Street should be angled right out of the layout at about 30 degrees, but I couldn't easily adapt that to the space and the balloon loop around the granary needed for the working roadway. The row of shops at the very back is correct, although still with arbitrary shopfronts borrowed from models. A few, such as the hotel and motor garage, are pretty much correct.

The buildings are all done, except for some minor cleanups and detail work that will come later (fences, gardens, etc). As usual with this tiny scale, the closeup photos are extremely cruel, but at a normal viewing distance they look good enough to do the job. So, onward to the backscene!

After a long break and the half-year detour to Malmsbury, I am finally back on to this one. That means starting up again by taking stock of where I had got to before, which was a preliminary rough coat of paint on some of the buildings. So, the next steps will be to complete them and tackle the backscene. Those two were the main causes of the pause, and one of the goals of Malmsbury was to try out some new techniques to break the logjam.

I hadn't planned to do any more posts on Malmsbury, but when cleaning everything up I found I had taken a lot of pictures during construction. So, I've cobbled together yet another video, a photomontage documenting how the layout was designed and built. I'd really appreciate some feedback on whether or not this is worthwhile., so thanks in advance to those who speak up.

And Malmsbury is now complete. I let the layout do its own thing while I played trainspotter with the camera.

I didn't have any proper OO figures to hand, so had to improvise! And they are to the correct scale. Well, maybe not the heads. Anyway, all boxed up and ready to go out with Monday's post.

The Malmsbury layout is nearly finished, with the last couple of trains being built and tested. Then just some final detailing work and the exhibition-mode software, then back onto long-delayed Penzance.

After temporarily running out of steam on Penzance, with the sheer number of buildings needing painting and detailing, and complex backscene of the urban setting forming a fearsome gradient to tackle, I decided to do a quick little side project. So, with the fireman shovelling away and both injectors on, the boiler pressure is rising again and I'll soon tackle that bank again. The little side project is a model of Malmsbury (Australia), using my customary 1:480 linear motor version of T Gauge, on my customary 6 foot by 2 foot baseboard, set loosely in the 1960s at the end of steam. This will give me somewhere to run my Victorian trains, and an excuse to make more of them. Test trains have been running, the scenery is mostly complete, with the trees, bushes and fences nearly ready for planting. Then it is just a matter of making half a dozen more trains and writing the full operating software. Malmsbury is a minor station about 100km north of Melbourne, Australia on the old Victorian Railways line to Bendigo. This was opened in 1862, and was the only Australian country line built to UK mainline standards, with Brunel as the consulting engineer. When the local politicians received the final bill, they had collective heart failure, and every Australian line since then has been built to very different standards. Malmsbury has some local fame due to the nearby viaduct, which while modest by UK standards is the largest stone viaduct in Australia. The nice thing about modelling in T Gauge is that both station and viaduct fit comfortably on a 6 foot board without compression. The layout is just a basic double oval with dummy pointwork in the station, with everything kept as simple as possible to minimise the total work required. The hidden half of each oval can store nearly 6 feet of trains nose-to-tail, so 8-10 in total.

The actual track gauge is just a minor detail for me now, and that scene is so typically VR, broad gauge or narrow, I just couldn't resist using it.