TechnicArrow

I didn't think I'd be posting again today, but I couldn't resist experimenting a bit... I've placed the diorama on the bookshelf. It's illuminated by a small torch wedged against the next shelf up, and the sharp beam diffused into "daylight" by a receipt! Clearly a more permanent solution is needed, but wow am I happy with that effect! I'm now considering making it a daytime scene rather than a night one, since mounting a few overall lights will be much easier than making a working miniature site floodlight or two. But that means the backscene is the wrong colour, and the corners are very visible. Any thoughts?

Thank you @simon b for your information. A very interesting location, and if I'd known about it earlier I probably would have properly tried to model it! Oh well. And thank you for your words @Kevin Johnson - I'm pretty pleased with the mirror effect too, it works really well in person. Not a lot of progress to report today, but I've tidied the ballast around the sleepers and added some rubberised horsehair foliage around the walls. I've also added a fascia - yet another layer of cereal box card applied to the front and sides, and painted black. It's looking much smarter now. The darkish blob in the bottom-right is a small on/off switch - not that it's wired to anything yet. I have yet to experiment with locations for the LEDs, so that'll be next!

Good find! The sharp curve of single track in a damp cutting... I tried (briefly) to find a prototype to base my scene off, but it seems you've found one instead. Do you know where it is?

Cheers @Kevin Johnson & @simon bfor the encouragement, and to everyone else who's 'liked' my posts! Yesterday, a package containing 6cm square mirrors arrived... It makes a surprising difference now it fills the opening. At this point the mirror, bridge, bark 'rock' face and track have been PVA glued to the scene. Next I made a start on the ground cover - finely sieved garden soil, because it works well and I don't actually have any suitable 'proper' ballast! Whilst it was still soft I drove the landie through it a bit to create some ruts. Green flock was also added to various corners and ledges. Finally, the backscene was painted a dark bluey-black, since the scene will be set at night. Next I need to trim the track and clean up the ballast, and make a start on the lighting...

And I'm back! The past two days have seen some time spent on building a proper high arched retaining wall, inspired by those around Birmingham New Street. I tried to paint it in subtly different colours to the bridge, but it came out looking the same anyway! The wall is fixed in place; there are cut-outs in the diorama wall to accommodate the recesses. Now I need to start fixing the rest of the scene, which means I need to wait for delivery of a 60mm square mirror that will fill the bridge opening properly. But it's coming together!

A change that makes little difference to the scene, but is nonetheless crucial: there diorama now has a proper box! Made of the usual corrugated card, the base has received a skin of cereal card top and bottom, as will the walls in due course. The scene is also raised up on a small plinth, in order to accommodate batteries, switch and wiring for the lighting. I made the box a little wider than the original area, to allow the landie to fit properly and provide space for the surveyor with his tripod-mounted level. Unfortunately there will be no progress over the next week, but I look forward to returning to this project next weekend!

It's certainly different now, isn't it! I love your comparison photos - they're nicely framed and lined up, and very sharp. Even if they make me wish I was still there (I was doing my university year-out placement with a company in the area until lockdown)!

Thank you both! I briefly considered using two mirrors, but I couldn't work out how to get it to make sense in the small space. In the mean time, the bridge has received a coating of brick-embossed plasticard (Wills I think), with extra care paid to ensuring it's square and true to match up to the mirror. I then painted it with Revell AquaColour 'reddish brown', and when that had dried a coat of diluted grey poster paint was applied and wiped off to leave it in the mortar courses. The overall colour is a lot darker and "smokier" than I intended, but I think it makes a lot of sense for the setting. Nothing in the scene is fixed down yet, so these photos take a lot of balancing to set up! Further additions include the replacement of the right-hand wall with some conifer bark to represent a more natural rock cutting, and the beginnings of the portable work lights. These are cut-down sections of those white marker posts you get with Hornby uncoupling ramps, which I seem to have plenty of. Cool-white LEDs will be mounted on the beams, wired in from behind the retaining wall. It's beginning to come together!

Thank you both! I did consider cutting some rolling stock in half, but it would just obscure the mirror making it pointless. I've mocked up a bridge with a smaller arch, which works better with this mirror but is still big enough for (theoretical) trains to pass. If only the mirror was a bit taller...

I came across the idea of a "Book Nook" by accident last night - you create a scene (usually an alleyway or corridor) to fit amongst the books on your shelf, with a carefully angled mirror at the back to double it's apparent depth. And so I immediately thought, could I do that with a railway... My first trial looked promising. 125mm is clearly too short for any rolling stock, so I plan to pose a set of Bachmann permanent way workers with a vehicle or two. Using an old poorly-built scalescenes bridge and some boxes as placeholders, I was pretty happy with this scene. However, it felt a bit too wide. My second attempt is narrower; it will take up less spaceon the shelf, but results in a more cramped scene and forces the mirror to be at less of an angle, making it easier to see "out" of the scene. I was hoping this could be a quick project, but the mirrors I have to hand are too small so I'll need to order some more. I'm also hoping to illuminate the scene with vehicle headlights and flashing beacons, and miniature portable floodlights.

This wharf layout has recieved a few minor additions recently. First off, a thin strip of backscene has been added behind the end warehouse, which really helps to tidy up the scene. Secondly, the collection of loose cargo has grown to what you see below. These are used across all my layouts, hence why many have threads attached to allow them to be moved by working cranes. They certainly make the layout look busy! And last but not least - I've finally made a video! It took most of the morning to shoot it, and features several craftily-timed cuts to hide the appalling running quality of my very-second-hand trackwork. But it came out well in the end, so I hope you enjoy it!

The yard layout looks really good - I like that you've kept it in two boxes, but shifted the scenic break to give more scenic area, even if (I presume) it means you can't separate them. I also quite like the front wall, creating a full 360 scene - unless it's blank on the inside? If I ever switch to N gauge, building something like this looks like an excellent place to start!

Stunning on the gate and ground cover, as ever! Everything here just looks right. Out of interest, how does the whole layout look now? If you're using paint to crop your photos, then that shrink them too - click "resize" (to the right of the select tool I think), and enter your desired percentage or pixel size. Make sure to "save as" afterwards, and not overwrite the original photo!

All done in a day! First off, I cut away most of the material behind the end wall, allowing me to score it and fold it back. I then built up the inset track up to it and the existing 'concrete', using many layers of card: I remembered just in time to solder a pair of wires between the two tracks, to power the isolated front track from the fishplated connection of the rear track. The concrete was then painted and weeded, and a basic interior for the warehouse was built of two walls and a platform, painted white. Finally, the roof is a recycled portion of the Green Lane Wagon Works shed. I'm pretty happy for this for a day's work! Although a lot of the work was already done I suppose, I was just rearranging things. Behind the scenes, things aren't so pretty - the roof is barely balanced on the walls. However, I think this open end is a good opportunity to model the inside of the building - time to brush up my interior skills! The layout has now grown to just over 1m long! Not very micro anymore. But it still packs into two boxes, since all the bits below can be taken off, and the end wall folded back to it's original state: Maybe it's finally time to sort that backscene, I don't think the layout will grow any more...

I've been operating this layout occasionally, and have decided it needs an extension to the right. I need a proper base and interior for the end warehouse, and the headshunt is to short to be realistic. I've started by building the "board", using the same design as the sector plate one - two layers of corrugated card laid perpendicularly, topped off with a layer of cereal box card. This will have the two short sections of track fixed on it, with the current end wall slewed backwards somehow. Whilst that was gluing up, I turned my attention to the sliding door. It's not been working so well recently, and the external mechanism would be in the way of any new buildings. To replace it, I used a scrap of square plastic rod to add a smooth rail above the opening, and hung the door off it using straps of card. A card lever slides in a slot behind the lower guard rail to connect to the door to a pull-tab at the front of the layout. It doesn't run quite so smoothly now I've covered the white plastic rod with black paint, but it still both looks and slides much better than the old version, and leaves more of an opening so van wagons actually fit. Now onto the extension!

I'd say it also depends on how permanent you want your layout to be! I too have never worked with boxfiles, but all my shoebox layouts have used nothing more than two layers of corrugated cardboard (laid with the corrugations perpendicular to eachother) topped off with cereal box card. I'm not particularly concerned about long-term life, since I expect I'll lift the track and buildings to use on something else in the future. If it's only a short-term layout and you don't want to re-use the box later, gluing track straight into the boxfile would probably be fine - but I repeat I've never used boxfiles. Alternatively you could fix the scenery to an insert layer as mentioned above, and if you feel it's still too flimsy then a base could be added to the underside, to retain as much of the depth within the box as possible.

Finally, I've started on the roofs! First I painted an area of cereal box card with various shades of dar-bluish-grey paint. This was then cut into 5mm wide strips: Some of those strips were then cut into roughly 5mm squares, put in a dish and shaken up. I then spread PVA over an area of the roof, and started to place these "tiles", overlapping and staggering each row over the one beneath. Overall, it seems to have worked - the roof has a good texture, and the tiles are fairly consistent but with a little randomness in colour and size as intened. The "Valley" where the roof pitches join was interesting though, and there's a lot of card-coloured edges visible. I'm not sure yet if I want to repeat the process for the larger roof of the other stone warehouse, but I've got the strips cut already so I might as well!

Thanks, I'm glad you agree the scene 'works'! The cameos use plain old Bachmann figures, mostly from the steam/diesel loco driver packs. Only the man upstairs catching things from the winch is glued down - even the pallets and sacks are loose, so any scene can be set up and they can be used across multiple layouts.

In Scratch 3.0 (the current online version), you can import CSV files into lists by right-clicking on the list...

It's boat time! I haven't been spending much time on this layout recently, but a few days over the past week have been used to assemble and paint this narrowboat. I built it from scratch using (as always!) cereal box card, following rough dimensions found around the internet. The cabin sides were produced digitally, along the lines of the Grand Union Canal Carrying Company's livery. Red and blue paint for the rest of the body was then mixed up to match the colours produced by the printer. It's far from an accurate model - it still needs all sorts of detailing especially around the cabin roof and deck areas, and some ropes to moor it to the quay. Overall though I'm pretty pleased with how it's turned out. I also printed details for the sides of the Lowfit, a simple card-deck-on-Dapol-chassis bodge. Again the printing has come out not quite the right colour, but it's better than plain brown. The load is an Oxford Diecast ferguson tractor, that really needs to be chained down properly. A little experimentation made it apparent that because there's no run-around loop, I can use larger engines on this layout - up to a Collet Goods. It doesn't fit on the headshunt with two wagons and the tender, but that can be extended easily enough. Finally, I did some coding this afternoon. As an alternative to shuffling cards with pictures of the wagons, I made a simple Scratch project that lets you enter wagon descriptions, then selects a number of them in a random order. This can be used to produce a string of 5 wagons out of 8 for an inglenook, or to randomly allocate wagons to pre-numbered spots on the layout as I'm doing here. Scratch can be used on a mobile device, so it's quite easy to have it on my phone whilst I'm shuntibg. I would show a photo, but I use my phone for that too so I can't! If anyone wants to have a go, you can find it here: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/406428717/

Keeping the industrial theme, I like it. Do you plan to join the crates together, or have them as separate scenes? If you mirrored the new box to have the entrance on the right-hand side, you could use the third one to create a traverser fiddle yard that sits between the two scenic crates. That way you could have more than one track in the new scene, and one larger layout.

More wet weather, so more modelling... Finally, the rear warehouse and office buildings have been fixed down. The thread for the warehouse winch passes through the backscene via a tube taken from an expired biro, which helps to reduce friction. It's then fixed to a disc, the same diameter as the height of the winch; as the disc is rotated (by hand), the winch is continuously pulled up and then let down. There's a large sack on the hook to provide enough weight to pull the hook down. Once the buildings were fixed, I added neat PVA and green scatter material along the walls and in the crevices in the concrete. Next, I realised the canal quayside needed mooring bollards, but smaller than the push-pins for the chain shunting. I could just buy them... But that felt like cheating, I haven't spent a penny on this layout yet. So I scratchbuilt them, a piece of spare plastic sprue and a couple of layers of card hole-punchings forming each one. I also added a hand/guard rail to protect the point lever from both model vehicles, and me! It uses wire from an unbent paperclip. I fond that the bollards help to reinforce that the front is a canal quay, even though there's no proper boats or "water" yet. Both they and the railing pass the yard crew's extensive "sitting" and "leaning" tests, it seems! There's not much to do now, although I do need to build a boat and the buildings want proper rooves.

You've achieved an amazing perspective effect with this layout - in many of your photos, I can't work out what's really horizontal and what's vertical! Fantastic work!

@simonmcp by "brightness" I do indeed mean "saturation", and by "program" I mean "MS Word"! @Kevin Johnson Thanks, I always enjoy working with card and paper more than embossed plasticard - it doesn't need painting for a start! Modelling this week has been pretty slow, due to both mild illness and university work. But with those out of the way, I finally got back to tidy up these buildings. That includes replacing the arches with better bricks and the concrete lintel with a strip of card, adding windows (sharpie'd frames), and painting the doors white inside and chocolate brown outside. There's now also a small platform inside the warehouse. The bollards also got painted black, as well as the recently added point levers. Finally, we're getting somewhere! The paint doesn't appear to have hindered the chain shunting; I did have to think carefully about where to put the point levers though!

All that happened today was I added doors to the end warehouse. These are sandwiches of card scored to represent planking, with a reinforcing framework added to the inside. Now they just need painting. The insides will be a grubby white, but colour do you think the outside should be?