1:1 Scale Low Relief

It took me awhile to spot it when photographing this building in Horncastle

Meanwhile closer to home I seem to have got the hang of 1:1 scale weathering

Viewpoints

In my last post I mentioned how important viewpoints are to the success of a model of Cadeby. Whilst looking up something completely different on Chris Ford's brilliant blog I came across an excellent example of the type of viewpoint I had in mind. I've edited it slightly to bring it in line with the scenes I'm trying to capture.

 So imagine this with a shed on the right hand side and an overgrown fence running down the left, or the loco disappearing between a large tree on either side into a wooded area bounded on one side by a road and on the other a garden.

Cadeby: The Track Plan

Somewhere in the back of one of the sheds I hope there is still some ancient  Eggerbahn track from the OO9 layout I built with my brother and father in the seventies. If not I'm going to have a major think. I've considered Shinohara HOn2.5 but I believe that isn't compatible with some chassis. I have built OO9 track in the past but I want to avoid that if I possibly can given that I'm working on a corner of my desk and without access to most of my toolbox. Incidentally a kit for a 7 1/4" gauge point arrived this week, but that is a different story altogether.

In any case I'm still far from certain of how to make best use of the space, or even which axis to choose as the front. Here are a couple of options but I've been doodling others.

What makes this difficult, I've decided, is that what made Cadeby successful despite the small size of the site was that it presented you with a number of set viewpoints, from most of which the rest of the line wasn't visible. There was the view from the churchyard, framed by tombstones, the view looking the other way  from the other end of the shed, the view of the sidings, the track disappearing into the woods, and so on.

In theory these should lend themselves to a micro layout, but combining more than a couple of them is quite hard, and because they are well known scenes they need to be relatively recognisable. I'm obviously not going to be able to incorporate all of them.

So much pondering still to be done.

A Smaller Box.

....containing this

As a comparison I ordered it in White Flexible Plastic , but clearly it is going to take a little more work to prepare it for painting

A Big Box

A big box arrived from Shapeways today. Although I've got several things on order it contained  just one small bag, inside of which was this:

Lincoln Model Railway Show

It seems a long time since I last went to a model railway show. So  I was pleasantly surprised when my wife suggested I should really make the effort to go to the Lincoln show. What I hadn't realised was that it was actually an excuse for her to go shopping with Mr Amex whilst I took the vintage bus to the showground.

I really wanted to go to see two exhibits in particular. Mark Casson's Grime St layout and the Modelu stand. Both, I'm glad to say, lived up to expectations. I'll return to Grime St in a minute.

Waiting outside Lincoln station for the vintage bus it was immediately obvious who else was going to the show. I'm afraid every stereotype of the modeller was represented and I pitied the poor solitary normal family with two kids who were looking for the bus as well. When it turned up I think they thought they'd been misled.

The show itself was, I guess, fairly typical of the type of regional show I used to go to when I was growing up. It was pretty mainstream in terms of the layouts on display, Eavesdropping on conversations in the over crowded cafe area suggested that people were really enjoying it. To be honest had I not had the camera with me I could probably have whizzed round and been out in forty five minutes.

But I did have my camera with me, primarily to get some photographs of the aforementioned Grime St and also to have another go at capturing Hospital Gate. Along the way though I decided to try and take some photos of the sort of layout that I would normally rush by.

So Grime St. A tramway layout that unlike so many tramway layouts is designed to look look good even without any trams running. Though if trams aren't running there are still other road vehicles moving, Mark uses a modified Faller system to animate buses and trucks, and magnorail for the bicycle.

I still wish Hospital Gate had a darker backscene, but I must admit I enjoyed it more seeing here more than I did the last time. I suspect that might be down to the lighting and where it was located in the hall.

Marske, had some very nice rolling stock but somehow didn't gel for me as an overall layout. One of those cases where I couldn't quite put my finger on why though.

The other 7mm layout, Chesil Exchange was a pleasant example of a light railway.

I managed to find at least one  scene  that I liked on an otherwise unremarkable  OO gauge layout.

I also managed to find a couple of interesting angles on the small HO gauge Duncans Mine

The surprise of the show for me was how much I enjoyed the N gauge layouts, of which Peakdale was far and away the best.

However some of the other N gauge layouts had some nice touches.

A few more pictures are on Flickr with Grime St getting an album to itself .

Rails Round The Rectory

I mentioned this book in my last post. My second hand example is from 1973 and was originally 30p. I paid rather more than that, but it is an interesting read and well worth reading even if you already have Font to Footplate.

It has provided me with a little more information that will be useful for the model, such as the trackbed being 12ft wide and the approximate radius of the curves.

In a brief moment of madness I briefly contemplated using the Busch HOf stock with 6.5mm gauge track, with the Decauville, Deutz and "self propelled" skip for motive power.  Perhaps it isn't that stupid an idea, but it  would mean having to build an even smaller baseboard to conform to the rules of the Dave Brewer Challenge . So for now I'm sticking with OO9.

For the first time that I can ever remember this year HMRC gave me a small tax rebate, which I'm going to split equally between the Eaugate Light Railway and this model. So I've put an order in for most of what I will need to buy, apart from the Narrowplanet locos. However I've got a stop gap solution in mind until their Bagnall is available again.