[cardmodeller]

The roof was covered in Scalescenes' roofing slates. Next, the awnings were added. To replicate the heavy wooden brackets which hold up the main awning, I fabricated them from card strips and soaked in superglue to harden them...

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They were painted a suitable cream colour and glued in place beneath the awning...

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The wooden platform on the rail side was fabricated from a strip of 1mm greyboard covered in Scalescenes' clapboard to match the floor of the shed. The supporting wooden posts were cut from mountboard and coated with superglue to harden them before painting. They were glued in place and aligned by eye.
Problem requiring a solution: how to represent the open wooden steps at each end of the wooden platform? I required some thin (but not too thin) card. A discarded tissue box was ideal. Firstly, I took some measurements from the model to work out the length and width and to establish the correct angle of the stairs. The measurements were transferred to the card and a simple diagram was drawn. A strip of the card was cut off and from this two sides and five steps were cut. The sides were offered up to the diagram and the angle of the steps marked thereon. The procedure was repeated for the second set of steps.

One end of each step was glued to one side on each pencil line and levelled-up by eye. When dry, the other side was glued in place. Once the second side was firmly attached the whole staircase was given a light covering of superglue, using a cocktail stick. This was to harden the card and to firm-up all joints.

Both staircases were given a couple of coats of paint and glued in position on the model. Job done!

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[cardmodeller]

Bargeboards, downpipes and other details were added to complete the model. In order to save time, and as the building will never be seen from the rear, I added no detail at all to the back.
The finished model...

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Terry

 

[cardmodeller]

I see no reason why scenery should be constructed to withstand an atomic explosion! Forget chicken wire, plaster impregnated bandage and so on. You are not going to jump on the scenery, so it is only required to support a small amount of ground foam and static grass without collapsing. Cost is another factor. I prefer to go for the cheap method of using vertical thick card formers linked by a mesh of thinner card (cereal packet) strips. To speed up construction I use a hot glue gun to join the card. I tear newspapers into small pieces and paste about three layers over the card mesh using £1 shop pva. I paint a liberal coat of pva over the top layer of newspaper. The result is a firm, strong and cheap shell. The shell is painted with one coat of brown emulsion and once dry, static grass and ground foam are added. I use teased out foliage mat(?) to create the weeds. This appears to be a nylon mesh which is impregnated with ground foam. I have used the Woodland Scenics' product but others are available. Here in pictures is how I used the method on Farleigh...

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[cardmodeller]

I thought that I would have a go at painting my own backscene. I was keen to eliminate the 'corners in the sky' so bought a roll of artist's canvas. My intention was to give the feel of the land rising towards gently rolling downs in the mid-distance. I estimated that I would need approximately nine feet so this was cut from the roll and nailed to a wall inside the shed. A pencil line was drawn along the canvas at the required height to match the height of the rear scenic boards. I armed myself with various cheap tubes of acrylic paint and made a very thin wash of cerulean blue. I quickly applied the wash to the canvas using a household paint brush. As the acrylic paint began to dry I wondered if it was possible to use a similar technique to that used in watercolour painting to depict clouds. I screwed-up a ball of kitchen roll and dabbed at the blue paint and was pleased to find that the technique also worked with acrylics. The kitchen roll removed the paint to reveal the white canvas beneath. It is possible to make quite pleasing clouds by this method. I touched in some runny mauve paint at the bottom of each cloud on the right side, the sun being imagined to be on the left. A small dab of cadmium yellow was applied to the top left side to represent the sunlight bouncing off the tops of each cloud. I walked down the length of the canvas with a 2H pencil to draw the wavy horizon line. Next, I applied a wash of sap green to the land mass from the horizon to the lower edge of the canvas.

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The field boundaries were quickly sketched, with smaller fields near the horizon, getting larger towards the bottom of the canvas.

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At this stage I decided to try to eradicate the hard line between the two greens and painted another coat of green, mixed to resemble the static grass used on the layout, over the lower part of the canvas. I then used a stiff artist's brush (of the cheap ten brushes for £2 variety), and used water to scrub away in an effort to blend the two colours. Very forgiving stuff this canvas. I then mixed sap green with a very tiny amount of black and, using a small flat artist's brush, started to paint over the pencil lines to represent the field hedgerows, the lines getting thinner as they receded away to the horizon. Whilst still damp, I worried the painted hedgerows with a damp stiff brush to remove some of the paint, in an effort to reduce their intensity. Some of the fields were given a thin wash of yellow ochre to represent cereal crops.

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I decided to move things along by adding some trees to the landscape and to enhance the hedgerows. All achieved by dabbing a sap green/black mix onto the canvas with a small hog's hair brush. (Please excuse the horizontal lines caused by the shed neon lighting).

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The completed backscene was attached to the backscene boards with bulldog clips. With hindsight I think that the grain of the canvas is rather too coarse for such a narrow baseboard. In future I will try to obtain a material with a finer weave, such as roller blind material. Nevertheless, I think that the backscene looks reasonable and adds some individuality to the model.

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Terry

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[PAPPA.B]

Hi I think it looks great and blends very well to the whole scene . I have been to many shows and the back scene's are a bit of a mix mind some suffer from being packed and unpacked but their quality does vary . Photographic as opposed to hand painted wins more often than not and although i'm no expert I have say yours is good if I could achieve that standard i'd be well pleased. Jim ps Thanks for explaing how you got there.

 

[Graham Plowman]

Some nice modelling and scenic background there.
May I make a suggestion ? The position of the water tower would appear to cause significant signal sighting issues for loco drivers. In practice, the tower wouldn't be located there for that reason. If watering really is required in that location, it would more likely be a water crane with a tower/tank located elsewhere.

 

[cardmodeller]

Thank you both, very kind of you.

Point taken Graham. The original article showed the water tank roughly in this position so I have simply followed suit. A very interesting article and well worth a look if you haven't already seen it - Railway Modeller October 1978, page 312, The Art of Compromise by Roy Link.

Terry

 

[cardmodeller]

With reference to the layout lighting. LED strips are fitted behind the pelmet. An unfortunate result of this is that whilst the roof of the goods shed is well lit, the front of the shed, under the awning, is rather shaded. Having gone to the trouble of making packing cases and sacks to adorn the shed floor, I thought it would be nice if they could be seen from the front of the layout. I don't usually install lights in my buildings, generally viewing it as a waste of time as I have no intention of running my trains in the dark.

How to cast a smidgen of light onto the front of the shed? What if I could redirect some of the light coming down from the pelmet? Maybe a small mirror to reflect the light? How would I fix it in position so that it wouldn't be seen? On the rear of a building? The mirror idea was a non-starter simply because of the difficulty in obtaining one so small. In any event, I didn't want a building obscuring the view of the goods shed.

If not a building, what? I needed a small structure which was large enough to hold a small reflective surface of some kind. I decided that a ballast bin (or chippings bin) might be the answer.

A quick bit of research found the prototype measurements of a Southern Railway bin. Out came the card and it was a quickly built and given a coat of acrylic paint. And the reflective surface? A strip of very shiny silver plastic from the bag in which the LEDs were packed!

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I cut a small gap in the low embankment at the front of the layout, opposite the goods shed and glued the bin in place. A small amount of ballast was glued at the base of the 'mirror' at the front of the bin. Here is the bin in position looking from the rear of the layout...

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And the contents of the goods shed gently lighted. Not brilliantly lit but just enough to see the goods...

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Terry

 

[cardmodeller]

Another unusual feature of Farleigh is the continuation of the scenery into the fiddle yard. I wanted to give the impression that the line carries on rather than just ending on a bare baseboard.
I simply added an extra bridge wing wall and built an extra peice of scenery using the methods described earlier. A Southern Railway concrete lineside hut (Ratio kit) was included for a bit of interest.

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A view through the bridge into the fiddle yard.

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Terry

 

[Graham Plowman]

This is a good approach - I have a similar situation coming where I will also have a bridge acting as a scenic end on my O gauge layout. The bridge will be roughly level where the bottle of PVA is in the picture below.
I didn't want a tunnel because everyone has one and it just draws attention to what is going on.
A bridge is a better alternative, however, you have to disguise what is beyond it and using scenery is the way I'll be doing it, in my case, with a cutting. Some people hang black strips as a 'curtain', but I'm not a fan of things rubbing over my rolling stock like that with the potential of catching on something.

Full details of my 'Salcombe' O gauge layout: Model Railways Online

 

[cardmodeller]

Thanks Graham. I agree regarding the plastic strips hanging down at tunnel mouths and bridges. They don't look at all realistic and I always wonder if they will get caught up with the rolling stock.

Terry