Nick Ridgway
The layout is an exercise on cheating! Cheating means only modelling stuff that can be seen, and cheating on the rest. For example:
- One of the internal user wagons arrived as an incomplete kit that was missing one of its sides. So the missing side is just plain plastic card painted black. One only sees one side of the wagon, after all, so it stays that way round. CHEAT!
- The rest of the world, a fiddle yard, as it is, is about 4.5in long, which is enough for an 0-6-0ST, or an 0-4-0ST and one wagon – just enough space to get stuff on-stage and off-stage. Its extension is dependent on other things in the railway room once they get designed and constructed. CHEAT!
- The rear of the stone walls is just plain card, and not modelled. They are only seen from one side, anyway. CHEAT!
- There is nothing in the yard behind the smithy, as it isn’t viewable from the front. CHEAT!
- The winding rope is black cotton, knotted into a loop. It tumbles a multi-diameter-washer assembly inside the cage shaft, as a way of keeping the rope taut. There is no cage, and no shaft. CHEAT!
- The east side of the engine house is missing, so as not to get in the way of the winding rope, which is turned by a junk 12Vdc motor through a load of plastic card shapes to maintain rope alignment on the way to and from the frame wheels. The front window is blacked-out so it can’t be seen. CHEAT!
- The corrugated roof on the workshop is too steep, as there isn’t space to do anything else as the backscene is in the way. CHEAT!
- The 3D world meets the 2D world at a backscene, with compatible colours in both these worlds. The backscene is my first attempt at Art since giving up the subject at the end of my first year at secondary school, in 1970. I’ve had a go. It ain’t difficult and the only thing that was missing was the courage to have a go. I’m no artist. I’m a CHEAT!
- I might have a go at using finely-divided cotton wool as a way of simulating smoke and steam in future photographs – more realistic in time exposures where it can be waggled about, of course. CHEAT!
- Make the photos monochrome or even sepia tone, because we are used to seeing historical subjects that way. It also cuts out a load of painting and colouring problems that become evident in colour photos. CHEAT!
The cheats allow something to be built that would otherwise take a bit longer. Excluding:
- Shopping and procurement time
- Locomotive construction
- Wagon construction
- Two buildings, the coal stage and a coach body that were built when purchased
- Design time
only about 115 modelling-hours have gone in from cutting the first piece of wood to its being presentable for photograhy.
See? It’s all about CHEATING – sorry – creating the illusion in the minimum of modelling time!
If I can do it, then you can too.
🙂
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This reply was modified 6 months ago by
Nick Ridgway.
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This reply was modified 6 months ago by Nick Ridgway.
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This reply was modified 6 months ago by Nick Ridgway.
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