Diorama Development

As I have mentioned before, earlier this year I attempted to make a mini-photographic diorama that could fit in my 12" square lightbox for photography. I failed at this, on several occasions, and eventually gave it up as a bad job. A few weeks ago I started another attempt, this time in the medium of cat food box and polystyrene...

It's early days and some tweaking may be required, for example I may re-profile some of the raised area behind the track to lose the 'ski jump' effect behind the loco cab. I opted to try this shot using the free backscene provided by the Railway Modeller last year as a background, and it really adds some depth, although if pursued it needs to loose some of the foreground grassland and bring the trees down lower. 

One area where this version has really come out well is the colouring of the track. I had been using Halfords matt dark brown as a track colour base and getting a very heavy looking result. This time I have gone for a lot paler palette, a mist of grey primer, then a light spray of Humbrol 29 "dark" brown acrylic aerosol. Once dry the rail sides were picked out in Humbrol 160, slightly thinned. Some weathering will produce a result that really looks like dry timber sleepers and metal rails.

More soon...

Colin

Buffers and Baggage

For a while I really couldn't be motivated to get anything going on the workbench, however the weather was really telling me to stay indoors and do something so I came up with a couple of schemes to get started on. 

The first was a reworking a Black Dog Mining (style) wagon as a luggage trailer for the O9 railcar, filling the cutouts for MicroTrains couplers and fitting pre-painted Black Dog coupler/buffer blocks in their place to accommodate a link-and-pin coupler to the railcar. A careful touch-up of the paintwork has made a pretty neat job of the changes.

Of course a luggage trailer needs some luggage, so a root around found a Preiser backpack, suitcase and bag, all pre-painted some time ago. To this I added an older style case using a modified ammo case from a ground crew set, and a bike from a rather basic 3D print I had acquired, possibly from Avalon Line. This filament print required a fair bit of fettling to look anything (and you have to ignore it's square frames!), and I had to add my own pedals from a bent staple and 5 thou styrene. The other side is very poor, but you'll not see that...

Bringing it all together, this is the result with the load fixed in place using 'Tacky Wax', I hope the bike was placed in carefully on top of that luggage! I need to fashion a 'U' shaped wire coupler to engage with the loop on the railcar ends.

The other task I set myself was to add buffers and nameplates to the light green A1 Models "Albert" diesel. I had always planned to have buffers, as per the Littlehampton prototype, but had failed to  scratchbuild any buffer shanks to my satisfaction. At the Doncaster show in February I bought some cast oval Dundas 009 ones, and prepared these in red primer before opting in the end to replace the oval heads with turned 4mm round ones, which in this use really make a difference.

I have also finally named the loco, it begins with 'A' but it is 'Amelia' rather than Albert. These are Narrow Planet plates that had previously done a temporary stint on an 009 Gmeinder. With all of these smaller parts for both projects painted and fitted on the dreary days, finally a nicer day appeared when I was able to give everything a waft of matt varnish over the changed bufferbeams on both projects.

In other news, I'm also having (yet) another try at a mini photo diorama to fit in the light box, but simplifying things compared to previous attempts and mock-ups. I'm even working on some ideas for the project after that... 

Colin