Making Model Railway Buildings E-Book

Andy McMillan

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 436

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

This invaluable book is essential reading for all railway modellers, whatever their level of expertise. The author provides an overall understanding of the purpose of making buildings for a model railway and covers their construction, their positioning and how to light them.Topics covered include railway and non-railway buildings, explaining how the latter can also enhance your trains; modelling attitudes, the use of scale, levels of detail and both regional vernacular and railway architecture; ready-made buildings and how you can adapt them to your own particular purposes; different materials available for building structures and ways of choosing, finding, measuring and recording suitable prototypes; step by step construction of a cardboard building kit to illustrate the use of basic modelling tools and to explain essential procedures and techniques; using and modifying 'out-of-the-box' model buildings. Also explores the subtleties of making model railway buildings from scratch without the use of a kit, or anything more than hand-tools and a few sheets of suitable material, giving guidance on the appropriate use of texture and colour, and shows how walls, doors, windows, roofs and chimneys can be created, painted, detailed and finished off. Discusses the many aspects of lighting, including external lighting, such as street and platform lights, and the internal lighting of buildings, the problems they pose and how they can be resolved. Lighting can create dramatic effects with reference, for example, to the installation of illuminated ground signals in N-gauge using the latest 'surface-mount' technology, and by producing brilliantly illuminated back-lit sunsets. Superbly illustrated with 622 colour photographs.

Leseprobe

MAKING MODEL

Railway Buildings

At first glance this model could be set anywhere, at any time: a typical English half-timbered cottage, a standard Mackenzie and Holland signal box and a generic platelayer’s hut; all of which could be found almost anywhere, more or less, and at any time in the first half of the 20th century. But look again. Those chalk cliff-faces suggest the south coast, the South Downs or perhaps Wiltshire. Ah, but that cottage is rather mean in size and sparse of timbers, quite unlike anything found in the well-wooded, rich chalkland pastures of Kent or Sussex, so it’s probably Wiltshire. But where are the station nameboards – and isn’t that an ack-ack station camouflaged on the hill behind, complete with gun, tractor and tents? If so, it must be war time. Of course – it’s Salisbury Plain in World War Two! Obvious when you know what you’re looking at – and all without a train or a specific railway structure to help you. It’s amazing how much of a back-story you can tell, if only you set about making the right type of iconic model railway buildings.

MAKING MODEL

Railway Buildings

Andy McMillan

This e-book first published in 2014

First published in 2013

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

© Andrew J. McMillan 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84797 743 4

Dedication

This work is dedicated to Laney and Anne, for it was their encouragement, patience and sagacity over several decades which so helped me chase my dream of turning an oft-disparaged hobby into an art form.

USEFUL BOOKS ON VERNACULAR ARCHITECTURE

Billett, Michael Thatched Buildings of Dorset (Robert Hale Ltd., 1984, ISBN 0 7090 1962 9)

Brown, R. J. The English Country Cottage (Robert Hale, 1979, ISBN 0 7091 7381 4)

Brunskill R. W. Vernacular Architecture: an Illustrated Handbook (Faber & Faber, 2000, ISBN 0 571 19503 2)

Evans, Tony and Lycett Green, Candida English Cottages (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1982)

Reid, Richard The Shell Book of Cottages (Michael Joseph Ltd., 1977, ISBN 0 7181 1630 5)

Young, David More Cobblestones, Cottages and Castles (Obelisk Publications, 1992)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1 BUILDINGS: AN OVERVIEW

2 SUPERQUICK BUILD: THE VILLAGE SCHOOL

3 RESIN AND PLASTER READY-TO-PLANT (RTP) BUILDINGS

4 UPGRADE FOR AN OLD PLASTER MODEL CHURCH

5 CONVERTING KITS AND COMMERCIAL RTP MODELS

6 SCRATCH BUILDING FROM CARD: WALLS

7 CROWNING GLORIES!

8 NIGHT SCENES

GLOSSARY OF BUILDING TERMS

APPENDIX I: ECCLESIASTICAL INSPIRATIONS

APPENDIX II: HEADERS UP!

APPENDIX III: ROOFS

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

It is a fact not commonly observed but, at its best, a real model railway is a genuine art form with the highest of pedigrees. Most railway stations, if modelled in 4mm scale, would need a space perhaps seventy feet long to get it all in, whereas many of us are lucky if we have as much as twenty feet in which to squeeze a representation. Therefore, for all but the very simplest prototypes, precise replication of reality in miniature is often simply impossible. This is just as well, for a simple reproduction would be mere craftsmanship. Art, by definition, requires ‘the personal input of the artist’ into the representation of something. Nowadays that means feelings, moods, events: in fact all the emotional repertoire that we once traditionally considered applied only to music. Sadly, people today apply it to piles of bricks, unmade beds and dead half-animals in formaldehyde. One ridiculous ‘installation’ was nothing but a room light which winked on and off now and again. I had a room light like that once when I was living in a student flat but I never called it ‘art’…

Traditional pictorial art, however, has always been the representation of something, someone or somewhere definable: be that imaginary characterization or portraiture, fanciful imagery or a representation of a real event, place or landscape. So, following that logic, a model of a railway indeed becomes a true art form the moment you move beyond simple slavish representation and begin deciding what to put in and what to leave out.

The major difference between a working model and a painting is that we need to work in five dimensions because to length, breadth and height (x, y & z), we are adding the extra dimensions of movement and time (v & w). By movement, I mean by ‘instants’ of action, the passing or shunting of trains in particular; and by time I mean by the representation of ‘period’ or era. This latter can be effected in several ways which, unlike those of a two-dimensional painting, are not necessarily ‘fixed’. For example we can, with a model, change both some of the content (i.e. the trains, which can come and go at our command), and our perspective (or viewpoint) by moving around the model. This allows us to place a horse and cart, which can only be seen from one angle, on the same layout as a car which can only be seen from another, thus changing the time context as the viewer moves. Such a layout seen from one angle might represent 1930 while from another 1950: the potential lying therein will be obvious.

By adopting the age-old traditions of artistic composition, we, the modellers, are making cogent choices about our trains and the landscapes we run them through and so can rightly claim to be artists with all that that implies, even if we are not always particularly good ones! As with all genuine art forms, excellence is something which only comes with study, understanding, and some practise in execution! We do need to understand the ‘tools of art’ for we cannot rely on the trains alone to create impressions of space and location: to do that we need scenery and, since we do not normally have the space to copy real landscapes, we need to create our size-limited versions by picking suitable icons and modelling those as individual structures which we then arrange in a suitable fashion. And that’s called art!

Aside from the fact that all the model railways depicted in this book are the sole work of the author, which is not always the case, it is perhaps rather different from others on the subject of model railway buildings because it also deals with the landscapes within which those buildings are set. After all, there’s little point in refining some subtlety in your scenery when just a few feet away there are bare baseboards, structural timbers, perhaps even open storage sidings which need hiding, and all backed by wallpaper instead of a proper backscene.

Photos 1–4. If you begin to design your scenery only after you have laid and tested your track then you cannot expect realism when you’ve finished . Fortunately, as this 1980 re-design of boy’s trainset plan 5.5 shows, even the smallest variation in depth is a help! Indeed, careful grouping of a few simple structures can improve things further, as can a hint of village .

Photo 5. If you want realism then there is just no substitute for looking at reality and modelling it. This applies as much to a homogenous whole of landscape and structures as it does to this passing mid-1950s tank wagon train. It is through creating such surroundings that the train really appears to be going somewhere, not just circling aimlessly.

Engines, coaches and wagons are simple – you just take them off the track and when you do they retain their value since you can either sell them or just as easily put them back on again. But scenery’s not like that. You will not want to put a hundred hours or more into building a fabulous Devonian cottage only to decide later that you need to ‘move’ your layout to Wiltshire to accommodate a new favourite train. Therefore this book will certainly go into considerable detail about the nitty-gritty of how you can and should cut card and other materials (even noting how you should not do so in such a way as to endanger yourself), but there are only so many ways you can photograph various sharp edges cutting things. So this book not only deals with the construction of the model buildings themselves but also challenges you to think about what buildings to make models of, what level of detail to apply to them, and where and how to place them. It will even suggest what colour to paint them and what scale to build them in – notwithstanding the chosen scale of your trains!

But this is not a book about landscape per se. There are so many of those (a whole world full, of course), and so many different ways of creating them that it would take an entire book by itself to even begin to do that subject justice. Nevertheless, before we start cutting card in Chapter 2, Chapter 1 will consider just what we are attempting to achieve with our model railway, because this allows us to understand what buildings we should choose to put in our landscape, what level of finish to attempt and where to put them.

And please note that use of the word ‘in’ as in ‘in our landscape’, for this is the first change in perception you need when moving from a toy train set (where you would traditionally glue something ‘on’ to your baseboard), up to a ‘proper’ model of a railway: you need to begin thinking less about gluing things onto a flat ‘board’ and more of creating a model of a landscape which apparently just happens to have trains running through it. Perhaps, as it were, just a ‘little bit of Old England’ or Wales or wherever: as long as it is recognizable in both period and location and suits your preferences. Here you will find buildings which sit ‘in’ a landscape as an integral part of it, not just as another individual bit thrown ‘on’ to the baseboard to fill a bit more space – and behind that simple concept is a whole new world of perception: one where we are going to make a model of a believable location, not just a three-dimensional representation of our own imagination. Our imagination is a ‘good thing’ of course; it is a vital asset to our first ‘trainset’ because when our new pride and joy trundles around an oval of track devoid of any other features it is our imagination which completes the picture. However, when it comes to filling in that imaginary landscape with actual models, then there is far more variety out there in the real world than one single imagination could ever envisage – and since no matter how much we attempt to suspend reality we know that to be the case, so it is that our model will never look realistic until we base what we model on reality.

So: having in Chapter 1 established first principles, including properly thought-through planning, we can then move confidently on to Chapter 2, reaching for the knife and the cardboard with at least a fair idea of what it is we will be attempting to recreate and why. In Chapter 3 we will look at choosing and using commercial, ‘ready to plant’ buildings’. In other chapters we move on to adapting commercial models so they suit location or purpose, then through making more drastic alterations to turn them into something else, before progressing to building from scratch when that remains the only means of getting exactly what we want. Finally, in the last chapter, we look at ways of lighting your models and landscape so that, like the real thing, your trains can run both day and night.

But the last word of this introduction must be to record my thanks to the many photographers, from the famous and lauded to the ‘unrecorded’ and unsung, without whose inspiration in the pages of myriad railway books I would not have begun the complex task of turning images of fleeting moments of history into miniature working realities. Thank you, chaps, one and all.

Photo 6. The whole model – trains, landscape and period – is best decided upon in advance. Having done so, if you then chose to include a model bank* barn you will, naturally, already have designed a suitable bank to build it on! (*Yorkshire for slope.)

CHAPTER ONE

BUILDINGS: AN OVERVIEW

WHY ARE BUILDINGS NECESSARY TO A MODEL?

There is a question which needs to be thought about before you even consider picking up a knife or a paintbrush: ‘Why bother’? Why model any buildings at all? Certainly most people want to have a station on their model, somewhere to stop a train and do some shunting now and again, and most stations have station buildings, perhaps a goods shed and a few huts, but why bother with a townscape or village as well? In fact, as was practically universal on model railways before the Second World War (and remains so to this day on many 0-gauge layouts), why model anything outside the railway fence at all? Good question! Actually, there’s a good answer. A good landscape enhances your trains. (Photo 7)

Yes, we’ve all heard of the station five miles from the village and thus called ‘Xyz Road’, and there’s nothing wrong with modelling such a place, but if you do, what do you load in your trucks? How would you know? What fun is there in shunting a handful of meaningless wagons into a goods yard without any purpose in doing so beyond that of filling a siding? Where’s the ‘play value’ in that? Perhaps you’ve read a book which tells you what the traffic was, but are you going to have to explain that to every visitor or is there some way of inferring a particular trade or traffic by modelling something? If your trains just amble through your model with no visible link to the landscape they are passing through, what is the railway for? What is your model for? Where’s the connection between a train stopping at your station and the people and businesses or farms it is meant to serve? Every railway was originally built with a purpose; why not bring that purpose out where people can see it?

Photo 7. In time-honoured fashion a local train arrives at a small-town junction station with passengers for onward main-line travel to a city. Substitute a steam train and a forest of semaphores, and this scene would have been recognizable to its Victorian inhabitants.

Even if you are modelling an actual station and are thus limited by what was factually there, you might consider which period would best suit the model from the point of view of traffic (you can always build or buy trains more appropriate to that period later). Then ask, ‘which is the best side to model it from’? ‘It will only fit one way’, is perhaps one answer but you might find that alongside the tracks on one side was a feature which detracts from the model’s story, and on the other, one which enhances it. Consider swapping them over if it illustrates the story of that station all the better for the viewer. It’s your model and you’re building it: if there’s a great feature 400 yards beyond your space-imposed scenic break, move it! Get it in there; use it to enhance your guest’s understanding of the line. Could you pinch a feature from another station down the line and ‘move’ it into yours, perhaps? That feature closed before your period? Fine. Either change your period or model that feature derelict: it may still explain ‘why’, whether defunct or not. Besides, there can be a very particular sublimity in dereliction, especially if that dereliction is partial rather than total.1

Consider this: could your guests tell you what part of the country your model represents from your landscape alone, without seeing any trains? Perhaps the landscape itself is sufficiently dramatic (like Tupdale’s Yorkshire), but that’s very rarely the case. The simple fact is that if you decide to represent a particular county, line or locality on your model, then often the best way of illustrating that location is to use architectural features to give your railway a sense of place and time; a reason, if you like, for just ‘being’. Local vernacular structures evolved with experience; local people using local materials learned to use them in the most effective way they could to deal with the material’s properties and the local conditions. Individual builders’ preferences also tended to further characterize buildings in one or two villages or perhaps one particular valley (Photos 8 & 9). These peculiarities gave their buildings a particularly local as well as a general regional character. Of course, materials differ as localities change, as do building practices, but that is what led to the almost infinite variety of ‘the vernacular’. That is why it is so called; for no architect designed these buildings, no planner made them conform; it was just local builders learning and following their local traditions, adapting them over time as different styles came and went. But if you want to take advantage of that individuality (Photos 10 & 11) you will need to represent it and if you can’t buy it, you have to make it: which is where we come in with this book …

GENERIC VERSUS VERNACULAR

Once you have decided to have a village, or part of one, then immediately you face another question: that of ‘generic modelling’ versus using a particular local architectural vernacular. Some modellers maintain that they want a generic type of landscape because then they can ‘run anything’. That is perfectly plausible at face value but my answer is always, ‘If the landscape can be anything why have one at all? And if you do, why does it matter where it is if you are going to ignore it anyway’?

My point is that if a Great Western engine is going to look wrong passing a Scottish croft, then an LMS Duchess is going to look equally wrong passing an oast house! Suppose there are no trains to see at all? Even then, a landscape with a Devonian cob-walled cottage next to ship-lapped East Anglian one will always look ‘wrong’ because it is wrong. At least if the landscape is appropriate for one particular area then you create interest before a train even appears – and when one does, at least some will sit comfortably within it, even if others still look out of place. After all, an expressed desire to model some indefinite place called ‘Generic Britain’ (or more likely ‘Generic England’, which is what the speaker usually has in mind), commonly means you are listening to someone who can’t be bothered to move beyond the train set stage – but if that was you then you wouldn’t have bought this book so I think I am on safe ground!

Photo 8. This seventeenth-century mill in Derbyshire is a typically solid structure in stone.

Photo 9. Another one 200 miles away in Dorset is of much the same age, and although the size and form are similar, the details are entirely different.

Photo 10. Warehouse in the main street in Dunster, just over the Devon border in Somerset.

Photo 11. This warehouse is beside an estate near Budleigh Salterton, in South Devon – the same purpose of storage on the same isthmus and enclosing similar areas, yet entirely different in appearance and construction. Each would look wrong in the other’s situation.

Of course, it’s your railway and you can put what you like wherever you like it, but if you’ve bought this book I am going to presume you have a particular wish to ‘do it properly’ and that you want to learn how to build what you would like to see, rather than having to rely entirely on mass-produced items by Superquick, Hornby or Bachmann. If so, where do we start? The possibly surprising answer is with ‘scale’.

SCALES WORKED TO IN THIS BOOK

As a professional model maker, most of the work I do is to commission so it will come as no surprise to learn that nearly all of these illustrations are to 00 or N gauge. This assertion is, of course, poppycock – how can you build a house to a gauge? Nevertheless, most model buildings are still sold as ‘00/H0’ or ‘N’ gauge, although more recently the words ‘suitable for’ have appeared on boxes even though the actual scale, i.e. 4mm, 3.5mm or 2mm to the foot, is often missing. Odd that; the terms have been familiar to modellers for over 50 years so why not use them? On the plus side, Oxford and other model car manufacturers are now including the numerals ‘76’ for ‘1/76th scale’ as part of the item description, so let’s hope that customer intelligence is finally being recognized.

Of course, building your own structures sooner or later involves measurement of some kind, so knowing what ‘scale’ you are working in becomes much more than just a convenient title, it becomes a practical ‘factor’ by which to divide prototype dimensions. Let’s take a simple example. You have a photograph of a building you want to model (Photo 12). In the corner is a ‘person of known height’ whom you placed there deliberately. (If not, there is always the ‘counting bricks’ option: a standard brick is 2½in high, mortar is ½in, so 3in per row times the number of rows …) You also paced out the frontage, of course: 14 paces and your pace is 33 in (84cm) long. (And if you forgot to do that, a standard brick is 9in long …) So you have two known dimensions and can now use your favourite graphics programme to change the perspective of the building until the bottom edge (if horizontal!), first floor, eaves and roof line are all parallel – or as nearly as the sagging age of the thing will allow – thereby removing the perspective. Then adjust the length to something which seems more or less correct, as in Photo 13, and print it off. Now, because you know the scale you are working to, you can easily use a calculator to obtain the dimensions you need for your model.

Table of common UK gauges/scales/ratios

Gauge

Scale in metric

Ratio

1

10mm to the foot

1:30th or 1:32nd

0

7mm to the foot

1:43rd

S

3⁄16 in to the foot

1:64th

00

4mm to the foot

1:76th

HO

3.5mm to the foot

1:87th

TT

3mm to the foot

1:100th

N

2mm to the foot

1:148th

Z

1.39mm to the foot

1:220th

Theory

A word of explanation for the young. As you know, we railway modellers with pretensions to accuracy work in a scale known as ‘4mm to the foot’, (or 2mm or 7mm, or even 3.5mm ditto). As such it is also known as a ‘bastard scale’ because it has two parents who are not ‘linearly married’ in that we have Metric at one end of the equation and Imperial at the other. It is not a happy marriage but the test of time shows it’s a good way of keeping the numbers simple for mental arithmetic. For example if a book tells you a real bridge is 100ft long then your model needs to be 400mm long. Just multiply the one number by four (or two or seven, etc.), to get the other. Easy! Much easier than trying to divide 100ft by 76 without reaching for a calculator – and how do you measure 1.31579ft anyway? (Perhaps us ‘old ’uns’ ain’t quite as daft as you thought …) So if you post-date being taught Imperial: now and again, just for practice, try working in ‘2/4/7mm to the foot’ scale because all you who have been brought up using purely Metric measurements might one day find you want to model an engine using copies of the original Imperial drawings. These will be in feet and inches, of course, so the earlier you learn to understand them the better! I will just mention ‘S gauge’ here because it is a totally Imperial scale, albeit one for the truly devoted scratchbuilder.

Photo 12. A photo of a prototype building I wanted to model, the major dimensions being accounted for by pacing out the length and by knowing the height of my then wife, Jenny.

Photo 13. The same photograph after being ‘corrected’ by a graphics programme. It’s not perfect, but it saves a long drive to Buckinghamshire with an assistant, a 30m tape, a notebook, a pencil and a tower of mobile scaffolding …

Practice

Let’s begin our example with height. It doesn’t matter whether you work entirely in Imperial, entirely in Metric or use one at each end because scale is a ‘ratio’ so it’s just a number to divide or multiply by, whichever denomination you choose to record the result. But I have to write something and, as I’m ancient, I’ll use Imperial for the ‘real thing’ and Metric for the model, which was to be 4mm to the foot. Find your calculator.

The lady in the photo was 5ft 7in. That’s 67in – a convenient whole number for calculator input. Her height measured on the photograph is (say) 9.8mm. Her ‘real size’ to ‘photo image’ ratio is therefore 67 divided by 9.8, or 6.9367 to four decimal places, which we can call the ‘ratio of real height to photographic measurement’. Now we are, for current purposes, working to ‘00’ or 4mm to the foot scale. Therefore a model of the lady would need to be a scale 5ft 7in (67÷[12÷4] ) or properly 67÷3, which equals 22.3 recurring; that being her ‘real-to-model height’ in millimetres, of course. By combining the two ratios, i.e. both the photographic-to-real and the real-to-model scale ratios, we can come up with what we will call a ‘Vertical Constant’ or ‘Vk’ for that photograph. To do this we divide her ‘intended model height’ – 22.3mm – by her ‘photographic height’ – 6.9367mm – and get (22.3÷6.9367=3.2196), again to four decimal places. In fact, allowing for angular distortion and a certain generalization, a ‘Vk’ ratio of 3.22 will be perfectly adequate!

Remember this number is a ratio called Vk but the number it allows us to calculate will be recorded in millimetres because that’s what we used when we measured her height on the photo. We can now put ‘3.22’ into our calculator’s memory as a ‘constant’ and we are ready to turn our photograph into a ‘working drawing’. Sketch out the building roughly on paper (Fig. 14) and then, using your Vk constant, simply read off any height on the face of the building, in millimetres, directly from the photo; multiply it by Vk and write the answer on your sketch against the dimension you measured. (I have numbered some suggestions.) You will soon have the heights of the doors, windows top and bottom, joist heights for the jetty and an eaves height. (Hint: if you photocopy the sketch before you add the dimensions and you can use it for ‘Hk’ too.)

Remember your roof apex is not in the same ‘plane’ as the front of the building and any attempt to simply read off its height from this photo will include an unacceptable distortion, so don’t try it! You might however, notice that the photo suggests the roof slopes at an angle of pretty much 45º. With this information, and with another ‘de-distorted’ view of the gable end (Photo 15) you can use the ‘measured height’ of the eaves to calculate the overall height of the arch at the top and thus that of your roof apex. Note that the window opening and squared steps on the gable are a great help in squaring up this end view on your computer since they are, by definition, both square and straight! Then, by projecting a line through the top of the side at 45º, you can use simple geometry to work out the building’s width. Where possible I prefer to use actual measurement or ‘paces’ but, where these are not available, you can either use geometry to establish your width or visual evidence which, if available as it is here, is generally safer. To describe the latter: on the original image I can see that the blind niche is two bricks wide, as is each gable step, which gives us a brick width of 23ft 9in at the eaves. Thus with an eaves height of approximately 11ft 6in, and half an overall width of about 25ft, (allowing for the jetty), calculation suggests the roof apex is some 24 feet above ground, or 96mm.

Fig. 14. A quick sketch of the front wall upon which to record the dimensions resulting from your ‘Vk’ factor (see text).

Length is arrived at by a similar calculation to height but it needs its own constant since, unless you were extraordinarily lucky, the scale of the photograph will not be the same in both planes. Thus 14 paces multiplied by 33in would be 462in, which sum divided by 12 to give feet provides 38ft 6in, the actual length of the building. Since our scale is 4mm to the foot, our model will need to be 4 x 38½ which is 154mm long. Because the building in the photo measures (let’s say) 71mm, we can now arrive at a Horizontal Constant of 154÷71=2.17, which we can call ‘Hk’ or, if we have photos of two or more sides, ‘HkSF’ for South Face, etc. If we note that figure on our sketch, we can now use it to calculate approximate dimensions for the width of the doors, windows and where along the side they are located. I say ‘approximate’ since although adequate for reading a ‘nearly side-on’ photograph, the stronger the perspective, the more factors there are which cannot readily be calculated precisely; perspective, parallax, lens deterioration across the focal plane, etcetera – but of course if you were really determined to be precisely accurate you would have measured the building properly in the first place!2 As it is, you have there an excellent and simple way of turning a photograph into a pretty good approximation which will be instantly recognizable to anyone who knows the subject.

Photo 15 Again taken from the same photo, this ‘perspective-corrected end view’ would be impossible to pace out, of course, but this is where ‘brick counting’ comes to our rescue.

BALANCE

Of course, you may equally ask, ‘Why do we need to model to scale if an approximation is apparently good enough? After all, our engines run on electricity, not steam or diesel; the flanges are over-sized, the gauge is probably incorrect and the passengers are plastic’! These are fair points but in fact it is a simple matter of balance: your trains are 4mm to the foot, their passengers will be the same so the doors on the station buildings they need to pass through should be the same scale too. Forget that and start inventing new dimensions for buildings which sit right beside your trains and that sought-after realism will be lost the moment you glue them down! When kept away from the fixed scale of your trains however, the scale of your buildings can certainly vary and not just overall but throughout the depth of that model too. Such is called ‘perspective modelling’ and it is commonly seen in dioramas. It can look superb too, as long as you are careful to ensure that the perspective ‘works’ from all the likely viewing angles.

It should also be remembered that early railway station buildings were designed to be impressive and substantial: the ‘new-fangled’ railway had to look as if it were intended to be here for ever. Thus even a simple wayside station was often a substantial structure built of stone with strong architectural features, fancy windows and heavy detailing given to such as barge boards, canopies and doors (Photo 16). These features were not only large to look impressive but large to cope with ladies with skirts hugely widened by crinolines (Photo 17) and gentlemen made taller by top hats of Dickensian dimensions! (Photo 18) An assumption that a door in a station building can be reproduced by copying the dimensions of the average house door would usually be quite wrong, therefore, although more than one commercially available model has made that simple mistake! So the first thing to do is to look at reality, find something you like and begin modelling it. You will find that far more satisfying than copying somebody else’s model and perpetuating their mistakes.

CHOICE OF SCALE

Of course, by the time you come to make buildings to go on your own model railway your choice of scale will already have been made through your personal preferences and purchases of trains. That fact might lead you to wonder which of the techniques featured in the following chapters will be of use to you. Well, all of them I trust! The point is that the techniques remain much the same whatever scale you are working to: it is where and how you apply them that makes the difference.

Photo 16. The Bristol and Exeter Railway-designed station building at ‘Sandford and Banwell’ station, once on the Cheddar Valley line in Somerset. The massiveness of the stonework, the fanciness of the barge-boards and the generally huge dimensions compared with local cottages were all quite deliberate and designed to impress locals with the permanence of this then-new form of transport. Sadly, the railway proved to be less permanent than was once hoped.

Photo 17. An image by an unaccredited artist from an illustrated railway novel published in 1865. One chapter – entirely irrelevant to the plot, incidentally – describes a works such as Crewe or Swindon in considerable detail and has been often quoted as a prime example of an early railway record. (From the author’s collection)

Let’s side-step for a moment and think about the ‘rivet counter’ or ‘armchair modeller’: you know, the sort who knows everything, criticizes everything and delights in pointing out every single mistake he can and yet, by definition, has never completed a model railway in his life. Despite his insistent, vocal and vituperative presence on far too many e-groups he can, fortunately, be completely ignored with safety until he can show you a completed model all of his own work. I suggest that will never happen because he is far too busy expounding his theories to listen to the voice of practical experience and is therefore quite incapable of acually making anything. He has yet to learn to stand back and see the ‘overall picture’ and thus the relationship of its component parts, each one in balance with the other.

Photo 18. We are on more familiar ground here with an illustration from a lesser Dickens novel of the same period showing what look like early District Line clerestory carriages behind some hugely hatted characters. (From the author’s collection)

Sadly, while his mere existence has, over the years, put powerful pressures upon the increasing quest for dimensional accuracy he’s had a negative one on the quest for better ‘realism’. Now with mass-produced train models greater accuracy is, generally speaking, to be encouraged because if a plastic moulding is produced to the right dimensions then we all benefit from a better model. But once you begin talking about hand-made models you move from the world of mass reproduction into that of at least the craft world, if not the art one. Here the difference between technical accuracy and visual realism might best be explained by reference to the difference between a ‘technical drawing’, whereby every detail of a subject is faithfully reproduced, and that of the ‘artistic sketch’ where it is not. The one is a basis for making a practical item in a workshop or as a means of illustrating its dimensional or technical aspects in an image; the latter is a means of capturing the ‘feel’ of something, or its ‘visual essence’, with the minimum of strokes. You will note that already we are leaving behind the precise language of the technical and beginning to use the vague, almost ethereal language of art. For the former, think Hamilton-Ellis and Locomotives I have Known and for the latter think Turner and Wind, Rain and Speed.

Photo 19. This may be a fantasy model but it was built to roughly 10mm:ft scale on 16.5mm chassis with the figures over an inch high – so that’s a big building in the background. Even so, the smallest details are those hinges on the first-floor loading doors – but with rope-knotted bridges and stock like that, who’s looking at door hinges?

Photo 20. Modelling an open sash window means making two frames but the effect is usually worth it if the model is prominent enough. However, adding the ropes and pulleys to make it look as if it might work is probably not worth the extra effort, although some armchair pundits might deride that as omitting a vital component … If so they would be missing the point as an open window not only adds a touch of humanity, but it is also a deliberate invitation to the viewer to look more closely.

But remember, if it is an ‘art’ it can be learnt. In model railway terms what it really comes down to is the difference between those who spend a lifetime capturing every rivet or brick of everything on their railway and those who decide that ‘capturing the essence’ of some particular item or structure is, all things considered, probably the better approach. The suggestion therefore is that with a bit more thought, but with considerably less effort, a model can be made which alone is less than perfect but which in situ improves the overall impression created by the railway as a whole. Putting that another way; with a little imagination, obfuscation and a modicum of skill, one might achieve 90 per cent of the effect of a ‘Pendon’ for perhaps just 10 per cent of the effort.

Generally speaking this is a better way to proceed, largely because you give yourself the chance to complete a model in just a few years rather than spending a whole lifetime on just one. You can tell the almost complete lack of artistry of the pedantic type of modeller because they never have a proper backscene and prefer to let you see wallpaper (or worse, a ‘bit of human operator’) behind their model rather than an artistic and appropriate background setting. They have no ‘vision’, no overall ‘impression’ of their subject – which in their own home is fine but when they exhibit their work publicly they too often convey to us a scene without form or structure, merely working on layer upon layer of detail in the misguided belief that ‘more’ is by definition ‘better’. Now if that’s what you want to do with your own time that’s fine, each to their own after all, but I know which I prefer looking at …

One notable society has the tag line, ‘Getting it all right’ – a phrase which is open to several interpretations. If they mean that everything you model should be based on a prototype, not your imagination, then I am with them 100 per cent but many people seem to presume it means that every detail should be faithfully modelled to the last rivet, in which case I could not disagree more! You should find fairly quickly that the level of detail you put into any model depends upon how many structures you have to create and their relative positions in the grand scheme of things, rather than the particular scale you are working to. Thus a 4mm scale cottage in the middle ground of a model – or even a 7mm or 10mm scale one in the background of a large one (Photo 19) – does not need any great detail of tiling or feature, whereas a lone building in the immediate foreground of a layout might need door handles, individual tiles and possibly even the representation of separate sash window frames if it is to look accurate (Photo 20).

POSITION IN THE LANDSCAPE

As examples of what I mean, look at the following photos of structures on Tupdale, a 4mm or 1:76th scale model. In the foreground of this model (Photo 21), right in front of any visitor, is a pub which positively invites closer inspection. In fact we demand it from the viewer by placing a small, unexpected detail which catches the eye; a pile of bottle crates waiting to be placed into what we now realise must be a bottle store behind it (Photo 22). Any visitor aged 50 or over will instantly recognize those once-familiar wooden boxes filled with brown-glassed bottles of stout, light or brown ale; each with a label on the front. They had a bright metal cap, for which one needed either a bottle opener or very stout teeth! The building itself has a commensurate level of detail although readers of the aforementioned age will spot the ‘Airfix Norman Church kit’ origins of many of its components … We’ll ignore the signal box and barn for now because I want to turn your attention to that large goods shed in what is, from here, the middle distance (Photo 23). But of course as the operator sitting at the panel sees it, while it does not exactly become a foreground model, it certainly looms a lot larger so we do need to be very careful about how we tackle it (Photo 24).

If we get in really close (Photo 25), we can see that there is a fair amount of detail present; for example, each stone is precisely defined with a cut line, the windows are etched (specially made for this model, in fact), and the down pipes have mountings onto the wall carefully detailed – everything you’d expect of a foreground model in fact – but note also the very muted colours in which the whole shed is painted: the colours are different, yes, but the tones are very similar. Then look at the texture: the walls are almost entirely flat. Stone which in reality is quite fat and rounded on the prototype has almost no depth here other than the odd more deeply-carved mortar course, the odd stone with the surface missing and a protruding string course around the base. Yet this is not noticeable because up this close the eye is attracted to the details such as the windows, down pipe and the handrail protecting the steps; so it does not notice the texture of the walls.

Photo 21. A huge landscape looks tiny if you can see it all at once and take in everything at a single sweep. Therefore it is vital to add eye-catching detail such as this pub which, with its rectangular black notices and square white windows, is immediately at odds with its undulating, flowing, natural surroundings. Further entice the eye with dark corners, repeated angular shapes and hidden detail begging the questions, ‘What’s in that porch?’, and ‘What’s that beside it’?

Photo 22. Small, fine details in the right place attract interest way beyond their size but need to be chosen carefully. Too much detail is self-defeating and makes a rural idyll too ‘busy’, though unfortunately not everyone understands this.

Photo 23. The goods shed in the middle distance is by far the largest building on the model yet it does not stand out and considerable thought went into ensuring it did not do so. (See text)

Photo 24. From the operator’s viewpoint however, it becomes a lot more important and blocks the view of the backscene, thus giving the railway more impact than its surroundings. The viewer from the outside sees the railway in its landscape but the operator is more intimately conscious of the railway – which is how it should be.

But the texture of a distant, substantial building is not provided by its wall’s surfaces, it is provided by its overall shape, the shadow the roof casts, the darker depths of the odd open door and the depth of the window reveals. If you now go back to the overall view which the visitor sees you will realise that none of this fine detail is visible from that distance and yet the building looks ‘right’ because the colours blend together and, because there is very little shadow detail showing, the structure sits back into the landscape in a way totally acceptable to the eye. And this is the whole point of this introduction; if you get the level of detail and colour right for the position of each model within its setting, then the overall effect can be fabulous.

If everything across the board from front to back is detailed down to the nth degree then there is no separation: no recession from foreground into middle ground, none from that to the background and so ‘through’ that to the horizon. The ‘mist of distance’ is lost as a result and thus any illusion of reality is lost with it. And don’t take my word for it: Ruskin, Turner’s very own Victorian Bosworth, loudly insisted that, ‘without obfuscation there can never be clarity’, and of course Turner, our greatest ever British artist, could handle both fine detail and ‘obfuscation’ equally well, having been first an architectural painter of note before he moved on to the landscapes ‘of soapsuds and froth’ for which he later became so famous.

Photo 25. The detail may be very fine and precise but the colours are muted and the shadows subdued: by such means a large building can look great from both close-up and from a distance.

And it’s not only Turner; Claude, Constable and Stubbs (of horses fame) all notably recede their detail as they move further from the foreground of their pictures into the landscape. Indeed, about the only famous landscape painter not to do so is Lowry who is known, of course, for his rather ‘flat’ paintings of matchstick men and matchstick cats and dogs …

Therefore depending upon your type and size of model railway and the particular structure you are currently making for it, I trust you can see how any or all of the following methods might prove useful to you whatever scale you are working to, and that some techniques will work for all scales but others hardly work for any. I’ll end this section with another quote from Ruskin who, to my mind, remains the most understandable of all art critics:

No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

What better authority could you want? I rest my case.

Photo 26. A selection of typical research books, each dedicated to one particular subject. Copies are easily sourced on the internet.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT PROTOTYPES

For railway structures, choosing the right building to model is easy these days. Books are available on practically every line which was ever built in Britain and often you could do no better than buy several and pick the line you like best (Photo 26). But most of these books stop at the railway fence (understandably), and while they may feature some local hotel or a row of railway houses which over-looked the station, you will have to look elsewhere for interesting ‘non-railway’ buildings to create that local ambience previously suggested.

All kinds of internet resources are of course available. If you use the internet you will not need me to list them here while websites change so quickly that what is current as I write this may well have gone by the time you read it! Fortunately there also remain the traditional methods.

SITE VISITS

You can, for instance, make the once-obligatory ‘site visit’ – and I mean in a personal, not a virtual sense, although that too can be revealing. Interestingly, a personal visit often reveals a lot of useful information, even if the location is now unrecognizable from the photographs which created your interest in it in the first place. Railway details themselves are often remarkably long lived, as this 1860s masonry culvert bridge shows (Photo 27). The original, rather soft, ‘rusticated’ sandstone has been considerably patched using engineering blue bricks and while the main body of the arch, largely protected from frosts, retains its original stonework that too has a new arch face, repairs probably effected by the Southern Railway during the 1920s or 30s. British Railways would have just replaced the whole thing!

Many station locations have changed out of all recognition since the days when the railway was king but the landscape surrounding a place, and the ambience that gives the locality, are all valuable insights for the visiting modeller, even if his beloved station is now a housing estate. If so, there usually remain some useful details to be found not too far away, such as this fencing on the old Somerset and Dorset line near Templecombe (Photo 28). The use of old rail for braced fence posts was a good choice: they obviously last! From the other side we see that the post is flat-bottomed rail, with holes in its flange for the wire tensioning bolts, but that the bracing rail is bullhead to allow clearance around it for the wires (Photo 29). Clever! Despite this, one had only to walk along a few yards to the next occupation crossing to find a concrete version, for the use of which material the Southern Railway was particularly famous (Photo 30). For the lateral thinker therefore, a nose around the vicinity with a camera will almost always turn up a few really interesting and attractive prototypes which you will probably want to add to your layout: details which rarely appear in books, such as this original railway occupation crossing gate (Photo 31), which still had cream paint on it under the horizontal timbers. It was well-worth measuring and drawing up for future reference. You should also try to find and photograph some local stone and brickwork as accurate colour references, invaluable if otherwise you have to rely on old black-and-white photographs.

Photo 27. Old Somerset and Dorset (S&D) culvert over a stream but with many and varied repairs over its 150 years. The low parapet is probably a British Railways addition.

Photo 28. Although the S&D closed in 1966, in 2011 this fencing made from worn-out rail remains a very modellable feature.

Photo 29. Such finds are also a great and accessible record of early rail sections, albeit not necessarily from the same line.

Photo 30. The Southern Railway was a great user of reinforced concrete for fence posts, bracing and even some level-crossing gateposts. Many still survive.

Photo 31. On close inspection this field gate proved to have some substantial flecks of cream paint on it. The local farmer confirmed he had ‘rescued’ it after the railway closed from an occupation crossing used to access his land. There are the remains of several others precisely like it within a mile so it’s probably an S&D original rather than a SR or BR replacement.

Fig. 32. As the only surviving complete occupation crossing gate in the area it was measured carefully and drawn up, as shown here, to record it for posterity. Then I sent that to the HMRS Journal editor, who kindly published it so anyone can refer to it.

Finally, with regard to non-railway buildings, there exist a few particularly valuable reference books on vernacular architecture in general and cottages in particular (Photo 33). These are listed on page 5.

RESEARCHING THE PROTOTYPE – CONGRESBURY, SOMERSET

Having looked first at the surroundings of our railway, let’s now take Congresbury on the Yatton-Wells line as an example of researching the specifically railway aspects of a station and its environs. The prime source of information for this entire line is the book by Derek Phillips, Steaming Through the Cheddar Valley (OPC 2001) (Photo 34). This not only shows some eleven photographs of the station but, because it covers every station on the line, it also providentially provides excellent photos of the trains and their stock too. With this base to build upon, a site visit a year or two later (seePhotos 35–47) revealed the station buildings long demolished but the station master’s house intact. The platform faces still existed here and there but mould and algae had discoloured the stone to the point where they were no longer effective historical records. On the plus side, although both bridges had been removed (one by which the railway crossed a nearby Levels drain, another by which the road crossed the railway), the formation both East and West of the station site remained accessible and largely untouched, although much overgrown, so that the approaches were recordable much as they must have been in the 1950s. The surrounding landscape was also photographed for the backscene.3

Photo 33. A selection of excellent books on vernacular architecture.

Photo 34. A typical reference ‘bible’ for anyone modelling a particular line of railway.