Somewhere in the Top-Left Corner of Wales... Ivor the Engine clockwork micro

[Ben B]

 

I thought, some two years on from making it, I'd finally put my Ivor the Engine micro layout up here, the project that kept me sane in the first lockdown.

 

 

This was the catalyst; with the world seemingly falling into chaos, Lockdowns, home-schooling, and the rest of the bloody nightmare, I like many decided to retreat backwards somewhat and happily embrace a bit of nostalgia.  With 5 of us crammed in the house there wasn't a great deal of room for model-making, but I needed to do something in the afternoons when I'd finished schooling the kids.  This little set was by Wells-Brimtoy (and may have been sold under their Welsotoys label), it's very basic, very cheap, and was at least second-hand when I got it as a child in the 80's.  My first 00 gauge train set in fact, and a treasured possession.  I'd been wanting to do something with it for years, and with ridiculously tight curves, it certainly wasn't going to take up that much space, that's for certain.

 

 

So here's the first doodle...

 

 

Being as I couldn't get to any shops, I knew this was going to be done using upcycled odds and ends from the scrapboxes.  This tunnel had come, some months before, in a box of tat off Ebay.  At this stage, I was thinking of reusing some old Airfix buildings off my childhood 00 set too.

 

 

I wasn't happy with it though, so I hit the scraps box for some of the mass of MDF offcuts I had from a previous job.

 

And then disaster- I couldn't find two pieces of track!  I couldn't make a full circuit...

 

 

The redesign of the plan.  After testing making my own straight track, I realised the profile of the rails matched some of the early Triang tracks, and I had two odd straight lengths knocking around, and with a bit of attacking with a hacksaw, it would all fit together.  At this point, two important changes happened...

 

1; I found, up in the loft, the abandoned baseboard from a part-built N gauge layout.  A lot of chopping and cutting of the top layer of MDF to allow for some below-track landscaping, and would give me a layout designed to fit in a plastic underbed storage box.  This would be perfect, I could keep the whole project contained when I didn't have time to work on it.

 

2; I started reading the Ivor the Engine stories to my youngest.  I loved the Ivor stories growing up, and it hit the whole nostalgia angle nicely.  And the more this project developed, the more I thought that the idea of a tank engine and one or two wagons pottering around tight curves fit this build...

 

Suddenly, it all made sense as a project; I wouldn't need to worry about not getting to a model shop.  I could make this all using scrap wood, card, paper, paint.  I decided to make a layout which looked basically like a 3D representation of the illustrations in the books.

 

 

I wasn't sure if it would work though, so I modified the plan, and thought I'd do a test piece, the viaduct which features heavily, appearing in many illustrations.  And just to make my life difficult, it would be on an S-bend.  The wooden arches were from some scrap wood which came from a dismantled piece of furniture about four-jobs ago.

 

 

A lot of sanding, filling, and filing later, I had this.  More on the grey bridge later.

 

 

Having painted it with white acrylic, I broke out the watercolours...

 

 

The book became the bible for the project; the excellent Smallfilms book, which I'd picked up at a gallery show in Bradford some time ago.  The exhibition had featured many of the props and illustrations from all the productions (Clangers, Noggin the Nog, Ivor, Bagpuss, and more).

 

 

The other bridge; when I was a kid, I picked this up on the beach (in, appropriately, North-West Wales).  I think it's a plumbing piece originally, that had washed ashore, and after doing sterling service as a bridge for a weeks-worth of sandcastles, I bought it home and it's been used on multiple layouts.  Re-using it here made sense with the upcycling theme of the layout, so it was repainted.

 

 

After base-coating with various shades of brown and orange, out came the marker pens to try and reflect the illustration style of the original pictures...

 

I was happy with how it turned out, and it showed I could crack-on with the rest of the layout.

 

 

[Ben B]

 

With the viaduct done, it was time to install it onto the modified board.

 

 

I was glad I'd got it out the way, as it promised to be the hardest bit of the layout with that awkward shape.

 

 

By this point I was developing a bit of an addiction to buying clockwork 00 gauge locomotives, a habit that continues today.

 

 

Some extra wooden bits put on, to establish the maximum height the layout was going to end up being (in order to fit in the plastic storage box).  Obviously somewhat limiting with the tunnel, the mountainous scenery of the Ivor stories wasn't going to end up appearing, sadly...

 

 

I ended up working extensively from the scraps of MDF (at least it helped me clear the shed a bit).

 

 

I really wanted to make the most of the different levels, and try and have an urban, and country, atmosphere on each side.  With an awkward corner to fill, I designed a rising curved flight of stairs, which also necessitated using up some of my dwindling stocks of plasticard.

 

 

Of course, using all that wood meant this small layout weighed a ton, so to try and save some weight I used some packing material for the landscaping.  Foam from, I think, a laptop bought in a hurry to allow home-working... a minor benefit of everything arriving mail-order whilst the shops were shut.

 

 

A right bodge of hot-glue and carving with knives and razor saws followed.

 

 

I had an old tub of filler in the shed, to form a base layer beneath the planned papier-mache, which somewhat negated the whole weight-saving attempts with the foam.  By this point the track had been sprayed black, then brown, then the rails with a bit of Citadel boltgun metal.

 

 

Papier-mache went on top of the filler, and the roads and urban areas were hit with dark grey acrylic, then a sponging of lighter shades, all very basic at this stage...

 

 

[Ben B]

With the landscaping coming along nicely, it was time to make some buildings.  There wasn't a great amount of room for urbanisation of this micro layout, so I picked a few key structures from the stories, and then decided on a couple of more generic buildings to give the impression of a bigger town.

 

 

The buildings  were created with balsa wood (again, dwindling stocks, and if I'd realised how hard it was going to be to buy any more, I might have used something else and saved my supply).

 

 

The formers were covered in thin white card.

 

 

Outlines of the key features were pencilled in (again, with reference to the illustrations).

 

 

 

They were then outlined in pen, freehanding it to try and replicate the style of the drawings.

 

 

Test-fitting on the layout.

 

 

I then used alcohol markers, which created a pleasantly uplifting-smell in the small corner of the house I'd been allowed to work in.  The shade of brown wasn't quite right, but couldn't be helped with the limited colours I had in stock.

 

 

For the corner, I created a couple of low-relief runs of shops, the scale wouldn't be quite right, but I hoped it would just give an effect.

 

 

The roof of each building was yet more 3mm MDF with thin card barge-boards, and MDF chimneys.

 

 

The station building.  This ended up slightly over-large in hindsight, and somewhat over-dominates this side of the layout, but I'd run out of materials by this point.

 

 

With the buildings done, I ballasted the track with sand, then it was time to move onto the final details... and as the pic shows, Ivor himself!

 

 

[Ben B]

I needed some greenery, and debated how to do it, with such limited materials available around the house.

 

 

In the end, I went for ripped-up sponges.

 

 

There was room for a couple of trees, and the sticks were from some actual plants in the garden which my wife chopped out whilst gardening.

 

 

And here's the layout, nearly finished at this stage.  In hindsight, I wish I'd removed some sleepers from the Triang straight tracks.

 

 

Having been a bit bothered by the low height of the hill above the tunnel, I made a separate piece to give it a bit more presence, that could be removed for storage.

 

 

The streetlamps were bits of plastic model-kit sprue, washers, and lengths of clear plastic tubes.

 

 

 

One thing I realised at this stage though, it was going to be tricky photographing the layout in the back garden or anywhere else for that matter, so I hunted around until I found a couple of large enough pieces of thin MDF that would just squeeze into the box with the layout...

 

 

...and painted a backdrop, with a nice, moody sky.  No blue summer skies here in the top-left corner of Wales!

 

 

[Ben B]

With the layout almost there, I realised I'd need to create a model of Ivor.

 

 

The starting point (perhaps somewhat cheekily?) was a damaged Hornby clockwork Thomas.  OK so the sizing might be a bit off compared to the tall, thin original in the illustrations, but it would be the best I could do with the clockwork theme of the layout.

 

 

Urgh, the joys of buying old toys off eBay.  Time to get the hoover and the oil out...

 

 

With only scraps of plasticard left, this was going to be very much a bodge job.  The boiler was improvised from a pritt-stick tube (the kids were burning through stationery with the home-schooling, and it seemed a shame to let it go to waste!), and whilst I'd worried about how to do those awkward-shaped boiler fittings, I struck lucky with some equally-dead fineliners.

 

 

Not the neatest job in the world with that supergluing, but the mix of plastics didn't want to adhere with the cheapy bottle I had lying around.  Some other details were from the Airfix spares tub like the Messerschmitt wheels for the spectacles and chimney caps, and the pipe-organ whistles are brake columns from the Dapol version of the Pug, spare from a 009 build.  Does that technically make this Ivor a Pugbash? ;)

 

 

I thought about spraying the loco, but with the illustration angle in mind, I brush-painted it rather thickly with Citadel acrylics (an ancient pot of Snot Green), with some bronze and red detailing.

 

 

Lining out with a very fine brush, and some work with a permanent marker for the livery.  I debated whether to outline all the details or not in black, but left it as-was in the end.

 

 

[Ben B]

Well, to paraphrase "The Titfield Thunderbolt", I had an engine, but I didn't have a train.  I thought I best cobble together some rolling stock, but quickly realised that even short 4-wheel wagons didn't look right, or go very well, around those curves...

 

 

This was very much a 'raid the scraps box!' moment.  I did however realise those ancient Triang 4-wheel coach bogies would be perfect, and went round the tight Welsotoys curves no bother at all.  So time to break out the razor saw to make some caricature rolling stock...

 

 

The carriages in the Ivor books were a bit basic and blocky, so I threw together something a little more streamlined from a broken Triang coach.

 

 

The damaged Triang shorty brakevan got a bit more of a chop.

 

 

A Hornby van, minus doors, was next.

 

 

Years ago, I'd chopped up some Hornby Starter set mineral wagons to make some 009 vehicles, and had the ends leftover, so these could form some minerals.

 

 

A damaged tanker followed too.

 

 

Some plasticard from the near-exhausted scraps box, some filing, some chopping, and I had a fleet of wagons and carriages ready to paint in suitably bright colours.

 

I realised I'd need some figures too, and wondered about how to do them.  In the end, with reference to the original pics, I drew my own versions.

 

 

 

A bit of work with the markers followed, then they were scanned...

 

 

...and printed out to something like the right scale, and glued to card.  Cutting-out was a bit rougher than I'd have liked, but the best I could do with a craft knife, given I didn't have any scalpel blades in the box.

 

 

[Ben B]

I decided I wanted another loco for the layout (besides all the various clockwork locomotives I'd acquired by this point, it really was becoming a bit of an obsession with them being so cheap and unloved!  I kept spotting yet another Triang or Playcraft tank loco on Ebay for a few quid here and there, and snapping them up...)

 

Of course, in the Ivor books, the only other locomotives are the mainline machines seen in one story, all a bit too large, and an Internal Combustion machine, which was too small to fit a standard clockwork motor into.

 

My other project by this stage was something for the nascent garden line; the Ffestiniogs "Welsh Pony" was just re-entering traffic in the real world.  I love this loco, and like most kids on holiday in Porthmadog in the 80's and 90's I imagine, I had spent many hours clambering all over the poor thing when it was plinthed outside Harbour Station.  It's probably my favourite locomotive, and I'd decided I really wanted to have a model of the machine.

 

 

My Little (Welsh) Pony; another Lockdown upcycling challenge, mainly plumbing parts (well, they'd reopened B&Q by this stage) and cheapy toy battery-powered locomotives.

 

 

Though it's not terrifically clear if Ivor is meant to be standard gauge or not in the stories, I figured a Ffestiniog England would look at home on Ivors network, so grabbed another damaged Hornby clockwork Thomas and what was left of the plasticard... 

 

 

This really did use up all of the plasticard I had left...  the rivet strips were somewhat laborious to do, pressing dents in with a screwdriver.

 

 

The detailing followed the same general principles as Ivor, with bits of pen, DIY parts, and kit components. to create something vaguely like an England Tank.

 

 

OK so it's a cartoony-caricature of "Welsh Pony", and was christened Enfys after a conversation with my youngest Foster-Daughter.  She's a massive fan of My Little Pony, and there's a pegasus character, sky-blue coloured, called Rainbow Dash... hence Enfys is Rainbow in Welsh apparently, so it seemed suitable for a blue-coloured Welsh Pony ;)

 

 

[Ben B]

And so, there we go, all done.

 

 

The completed layout, all assembled.  It all fits (albeit somewhat snugly) into an underbed storage box.

 

 

 

Considering how small the layout is, I'd gone to some trouble to try and create some distinct angles, to try and make it look bigger than it was, and also convey enough varied scenes from the books.  Oh and a couple of last minute details; the postbox was actually a piece of ribbed plastic piping designed to clip glow-in-the-dark tubes together, with a 00 buffer head on top.  A phone box was just a bit of wooden strip with some careful filing-down.

 

 

 

As I said, I think the cutting-out of the characters was a bit of a let down with the poor quality knife I had; I wish I'd coloured the edges of the card too.

 

 

 

I loved this angle, it reminds me of an old black and white film documentary film I saw on the South Wales valleys when I was a kid.

 

 

 

 

"Enfys" fits in very well with the scene, I think.

 

 

Well, I couldn't resist doing the tanker in Purple Moose Brewery colours ;)

 

 

And that was that.  Perhaps not 'proper' model making, and more of an art/illustration piece, but as a zero-budget, nostalgia-driven, compact distraction from the times it was completed in, it worked.  I actually derived so much pleasure from this build, it was great from start to end.  I'd love to do something a bit bigger in the future, too...

 

 

[Ben B]

One last outing for the project, as the winter lockdowns bit, out came Ivor again...

 

 

 

 

 

Something of an improvised shoot ;)

 

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by Ben B

[PaulRhB]

17 minutes ago, Ben B said:

Perhaps not 'proper' model making,

What?!? It’s brilliant model making! It’s not only retro in theme but in the materials that we would have gone for as kids. 
I remember using card sealed with pva, film canisters and pen tubes to create narrow gauge locos on the Hornby 0-4-0 chassis. The drawing lifts it to show the adult experience but it’s all the better for that twist. 
 

Brilliant, you ought to take it to shows, it makes me smile. 
 

I went to the exhibition too while it was in London 

 

Edited July 28, 2022 by PaulRhB

[33C]

What an inspirational project! Cheapo to the max! Nostalgia in spades....whats next? A spur to "Grumbly Gas Works"? A streamlined "Sammy the shunter"? Or, how about a Ghost train ride......You have plenty of clockwork loco's! Great work! 👍

[Dagworth]

Absolutely superb stuff, definitely would love to see this at a show somewhere.

 

Andi

[Ian Holmes]

That is an absolutely delightful layout. It really takes me back to my childhood. Nostalgia by the bucket load. You can be very, very proud of your achievement.

 

Ian

[PeterStiles]

This article is hereby accused of causing Big Smiles On Old Faces!

[The Bandit]

Very clever. Well done.

[CameronL]

This whole delightful thread deserves a Blue Peter Award. In fact, a gold badge! Anthea Turner would approve.

Edited July 29, 2022 by CameronL
Added a bit

[2E Sub Shed]

Agree - Wonderful modelling & as others have said is worthy of being included in a show.  Thanks for showing the build & design process in the detail you have.

 

[Ian Holmes]

I would also love to see this featured in the Micro Model Railway Dispatch. Would you be interested in writing an article and sharing photographs with the readers?

 

Ian

[nick_bastable]

delightful well done

[Stubby47]

Brilliant, both the the idea and the execution, very, very well done.

[Andrew D]

Utterly delightful! And very impressive. I wonder how many of us are going ‘Pssh-ti-gof, pssh-ti-gof, pssh-ti-gof, pssh-ti-gof…’ in our heads now 😃

[hespertalbahn]

Brilliant, just brilliant !

Thank you very much.

 

Best wishes

Dirk 

[Ben B]

Thanks everyone for the kind comments!  I did wonder before posting these, as it's perhaps more 'arts and crafts' than traditional railway modelling, but it bought me a lot of calming vibes and enjoyment making it, and it's nice to see it's struck a positive reception from equally nostalgic modellers!

 

A couple of people commented about exhibitions, and it would be tempting, except this is a layout that's only about 1ft x 2ft and just goes round and round, so somewhat operationally limited... plus I'd probably get sick of constantly winding-up clockwork mechanisms.

 

I did toy with doing something far bigger; I'd got some lovely 32mm scale 3D printed track of very tight radius (from Loco Remote), or maybe could have used some Hornby tinplate 0 gauge track, and had wondered about reusing the folding boards from my "Port Eden" layout to do a bigger, more complicated layout with more going on... a radio-controlled Ivor maybe, and some more series-accurate stock in a larger scale.  As usual though, it's the problem of time, space, money and storage, and I just can't accommodate it.  I think I'm content to have just had this as a contained project and a bit of fun, and it can live in a box under the bed until the kids move out!

[Ben B]

On 29/07/2022 at 16:19, Ian Holmes said:

I would also love to see this featured in the Micro Model Railway Dispatch. Would you be interested in writing an article and sharing photographs with the readers?

 

Ian

 

Thanks, I would indeed- PM sent!

[PaulRhB]

37 minutes ago, Ben B said:

plus I'd probably get sick of constantly winding-up clockwork mechanisms.

I’m making a powered coach for my old Bing clockwork to save constant winding 😉 I don’t think the size is an issue as a small display and you could make up a board with some scans of the books and annuals too. 
I’ve half built a OO Ivor mech and long thought about a 16mm mini layout based on the books.