Before restarting work on my 'Beck Bridge' diorama I had completed one of my 'microramas' as an O9 scene incorporating a wooden barrier and some experimental treatment of the grass at the edges of the ballast to look as if it had been weed-killed, a technique I then reused on the larger scene.
Something never quite felt right about this scene, it never gelled in the same way previous efforts had and I wondered what could be done with it to bring some life to it. Eventually I opted to rework the scene in a smaller scale with new details as a base to display items of my 009 stock.
I removed the wooden railing and larger plants and carried out a little reconstruction of the surfacing, filling in the post holes and also scraping back some of the grass to be replaced with basic ground cover. New grass was planted along the edges of the track over the yellowy grass used before, I think there is less chance of weedkiller on this line! The ballast was also coloured using weathering powders to tone it down a little.
Various items were prepared and painted to add 4mm scale detail to the scene. These are mostly slightly modified proprietary items, the fence being Ratio, oil drum Modelscene, the box Knightwing and the sleepers Peco. The WD bogie is a much modified Parkside example that came my way as a 'freebie'. It has had a fair bit of reconstruction using Evergreen 1.5mm channel section and 5 thou styrene using photos on Dave Enefer's
website as a reference.
Detail positions were carefully considered, I didn't want to impede the view of the chosen locomotives and stock, in this case 'Isla' and the Penrhyn quarryman's coach.
I am much happier with the revised micro diorama, but that is not a reflection on the change in scale, more a realisation that the original was pitched wrongly....
Colin
PS, whilst I think about it, I know that technically the diorama hasn't changed down in size, but the scale has....
PPS, it now represents a bigger area so it is in fact actually bigger. I think...
