Tom J

Delighted to see this making a comeback - I very much enjoyed your previous work on the layout and the diorama.

Thread from the dead!

Tom, did you just brush paint the window frames? How easy was this? I'm struggling to find much to go on as regards the feasibility of doing this.

Pete,

It's been a month or two since I last looked on here, for various reasons. This week I have had another unsuccessful trip from London to Devon to try and get my three year old little lad back in my life. In the weeks spent preparing for court, I've not so much as thought about my own plans to make my own little piece the highlands. Time and budget have other calls on them.

The last couple of days, to take my mind off things, I've been cracking out the books, and looking at one or two bits and bobs, and I found myself back here. The very last railway trip I made with my son, a couple of weeks before I saw him for the last time (Dec '10), was a day trip (consecutive nights on the sleeper!) from Euston to Kyle and back. It's a place I first learned of as a kind of myth when I watched Michael Palin's film as a little boy, and which as a railwayman I have since visited and grown to love. Very many happy memories.

I wish I was rich enough to make you an offer you couldn't refuse for what is a beautiful little rendition of a very special place. It's lovely.

I do hope the layout makes it to an exhibition over here again one day. Thanks for sharing your work on here.

Density looks spot on, Pete. You have reminded me of the highlands sufficient to have encouraged me to hit the workbench, and my slightly boz-eyed Class 24/1, today!

I think Steve Flint joked in the RM KoT article about putting some peat and seaweed under the layout for effect, but I can almost smell it just looking at that layout. Love it.

Pete, I am normally loathe to offer advice or criticism to someone who is millenia ahead of me in modelling skill, but just this once... ;-)

There is always a danger with a photographic background that it detracts from a model which is, by definition, an artistic interpretation. Use of things like 'smart blur' in Photoshop to remove detail but retain sharpness and colour rendering from the backscene image is quite possibly what would help to make the difference. I loved the first backdrop but when it was behind the layout it was the detail rather than the density that drew my eye the most!

That said, I would take some density out; having spent many happy (read wet, draughty, mist-ridden) hours on Kyle station and the surrounding area, my recollections of the place are invariably in conditions where the view to Skye and the south was affected by the mist, which is a further case for taking some density out. Retaining a little bit of tonal variation in the sky should help 'keep the eye in' though, so I would go somewhere between the first pair, but do consider judicious loss of detail from the image to help it to quietly support the layout and your fine modelling!

Perhaps the use of a smoke machine could simulate those days at Kyle where you could cut the floor-to-ceiling clouds with a knife and fork - my wife has been to Skye twice with me now, and still never seen a thing there...