[Gary]

Photojenic, the UK's leading model railway backdrop company, have just returned from a photography trip to mainland Europe, concentrating on Germany, but taking in Switzerland, France and Belgium. From this trip a series of continental backgrounds will be introduced. The first French background has just been added to the continental range. Scherwiller is on the West bank of the Rhine in the Alsace region.

Visit Photojenic at www.photojenic.co.uk for more information.

Further examples of backdrops available are shown below:-

Barmouth

Tredegar

Corfe Castle

And here are some of the customer layouts featuring Photojenic backdrops:-

Keswick Road

Hardwater Canyon

Skipton

Sidmouth Branch

Happy modelling
Gary

 

[Gary]

Just to say that my personal favorite is Barmouth (Abermaw) and its on my Xmas list for a new project.

My guess is a few of you will have personal backdrop favourites too, so if any of you would like to share your favourite backdrop with us then please do. I guess a lot of it is down to sentiment more than anything but very often we have to have a model railway that is in keeping with some past event in our lives.

Many off us will have started off our first layout with a Hornby Trackmat. Or even are about to create their very first layout with the help of a Trackmat. Nothing wrong with that. I got back into the hobby a few years ago by doing just that.

As you move on though, you then want to create something that has more of "you" in it. And from this point of view, I would dare to suggest that the most important factor and the thing you should think about more than anything else when planning a layout is the backdrop.

After all, you are going to be looking at it for a very long time, and it is the inspiration for the rest of the layout. Unless of course you are planning to follow a prototype, and in these circumstances the use of imagination can be somewhat limited.

Happy modelling
Gary

 

[Gary]

You have answered the question yourself Dennis!

You have continental Europe, you have America (and Canada) and then you have little old Britain on an island in the middle. Hmmm....

I do think our quaint little British locomotives look the best even if we are hopeless with kits!

There are kits available that represent Britishness, just not too many. Dapol (ex Airfix), Hornby and Peco do some. And then there are two big card kit manufacturers, Superquick and Metcalfe. Thats about it really. And to be very honest they probably offer much that British OO outline kit builders need. Now that Skaledale has 100 resin models or more in the range then the options are clearly a lot better. Not too sure about N gauge and there might be issues here. The new Hornby Lyddle End range has probably been a help for N gauge modellers.

Think about the available space though required for a model railway. There are very few home modellers in the UK who have the luxury of the space available to USA and European modellers. Given that the Brits do live in mouseholes and do have space limitations the Brits tend to fill all available space with track rather than buildings judging by some of the layouts I have seen. This is not a bad thing as I do it. There has got to be somewhere to operate all that fantastic rolling stock!

I personally favour backdrops as I am forced to work with relatively narrow areas and a backdrop brings depth.

Happy modelling
Gary