After buying a couple of box files a few weeks back, I had to come up with something to put in them. Pondering on the matter (with some assistance from RMWeb) has led me to the conclusion that Victoria Quay in Leith is the ideal prototype. This has the advantage of track still being in situ (and can even be seen on Google Maps), along with original stonework, or at least similar to how it looked in the '50s. The downside is that most of the area is now occupied by the Scottish Government offices, which is also known as Victoria Quay. There are, however, original whisky bonds still there which were restored into rather pokey flats.
I'm not planning to directly model Victoria Quay as it was, but a fictional area of Quay adjacent to it. This allows me to experiment with the track a bit more and have a track leading into one of the buildings parallel to the up and down lines on the quay itself. I was thinking I might name it St Andrew's Quay after the Scottish Government headquarters on Calton Hill. It should be a fun little project anyway.
Obviously, I also need something to run on the quayside. I have, in my collection, a J94 and few Hornby Class 06s, but I'm not sure either of them is quite suitable for Leith. Luckily, a £20 Smokey Joe, a £10 Five-Plank Wagon, a pot of black paint, some tools and the right copy of Model Rail allow me to create a near prototypical Y9 with tender as ran on the real thing. There's a few pictures of the Y9s at Leith, 10097 in 1946 and 68092 in 1946, as well as the only surviving example of the Y9s (although similar private owner examples also exist) at Bo'ness.
All ready to go when I get some spare money and buy the track, plastikard and few extra tools.
Edit: Of interest to modern image modeller, coal trains continue to run to Leith Docks (the part that isn't shops and flats). I doubt there is much to model there however.
Since my last blog post, I've only been home once. I had been hoping to make progress in ballesting, painting and maybe doing something to counter the current billiard table effect. Annoyingly, I wasn't able to get any of that done due to other time commitments. With the problems of job hunting, dissertation and so on, I'm not going to get near it again for a few months.
So, I've been pondering making a box file diorama with a duel purpose - to let me take pictures of models against something other then my room or white paper and to let me practice ballasting and laying grass before I do something larger.
I'm not thinking of doing anything at all complicated. Just a length of track, maybe on a slight embankment, angled diagonally across the box's flap, a cloudy back-scene and maybe a very small building.
The only at all interesting thing I was thinking about doing was mounting a light or two in the top of the box to aid photographic efforts, but that would be a late stage addition I think.
More then two years after putting together my baseboard and after many false starts, I've finally laid rail-to-cork-to-glue-to-wood.
I don't have massive amounts of space to play with, so it going to be largely flat. with maybe a slight slope coming from the right of the phone to break the billiard table look.
But what else to do with all of that? After all, an angled inglenook in the middle of nowhere (the track at the bottom runs right across the broad to allow for posing big engines) already looks rather strange, so if it's just grass and trees, it's going to look even stranger and present me with no operational fun at all.
So far my ideas are pretty limited - the main one is a set of coal stands, with a coal merchant's van and an area with mud and gravel when coal sacks can be filled. There would probably be a deal of railway rubbish - old sleepers, bits of rail and so on - around here as well.
In between the two tracks or at the far left, I'm thinking about putting this:
It's a rather poor attempt at a BR/LNER goods van, which I think could be hacked into some kind of shelter or storage hut quite easily. Making some kind of tarpaulin and procuring some model corrugated iron to lean up against it would hide it's origins enough for it to be suitable for a 1940s/50s theme I think. It could be perfectly complemented by some over long grass and a tramp.
But what about the rest? And the backscene?
That I'm not too sure about. I think the coal area and the grounded van probably give enough set peices to be getting on with. Some trees would probably be an idea. Rural or suburban backscene maybe? Village in the distance but not close enough to the line for a station to have been built? Who knows...
