Recently got back from the Thorncombe show having shown 50 x 50 Shades of Grey. Thorncombe is a village in the middle of nowhere near Axminster in Devon but has a well attended, guirky show run for charity by the local rail enthusiasts group.
I was very pleased to get the Chairman’s Award for excellence in modelling and expertise for Shades of Grey!
Makes all the effort of modelling and exhibiting worthwhile.
Great load of photos thanks
At the Thorncombe show in November I was inspired by a layout called ‘Hounslow Sidings’ which I see is featured in the January edition of the Railway Modeller. This layout is modelled with snow, and talking to the owner, Ray Norwood, he gave me details of a company called Precision Ice and Snow. They produce a snow effect scatter and a liquid that can be applied to represent ice and frost. It seems this is mainly used by military Modellers
Having sent away for some of the product and testing it out on some old models I was very impressed and decided to take the plunge and turn shades of grey into a wintry scene. The whole ship was removed to be done separately and after masking out the water and back scene I sprayed the whole lot from above with hairspray and then sieved the scatter on. I have applied it quite sparingly to give the effect of a light snow shower over a frosty ground. The ship was treated similarly and then replaced in the scene.
By applying it sparingly it is possible to build up a thicker layer by respraying and adding more scatter. Once dry the snow adheres quite well but I need to avoid tipping the layout too much as some loose stuff can collect in ‘drifts’. Car tracks were added by running a vehicle up and down by hand as well as foot tracks by scraping with an orange stick.
Overall with the atmosphere created by LED lighting and the dull grey finish, the application of the snow really adds to the feeling of a horrible, dull winter’s day.
See what you think!
Today was the first proper show for Shades of Grey at the 3mm society ‘Westfest’ held at Ilton. I was pleased with the reception it had and the way it ran.
I have instigated a form of the “Inglenook shunting challenge ” to make operating more interesting. Each wagon has a card showing a picture of the wagon and a choice of two destinations to be shunted to. The cards are shuffled and then the throw of a dice decides the number of the card to be drawn from the pack. 4 or 5 wagons are picked and then the train is made up in the order that the cards are picked. Next the dice is thrown for each wagon in turn to decide which of the two destinations the wagon is to be shunted to(1-3 for the first and 4-6 for the second) and the wagons are then shunted. Because of the capacity of the sidings and the fact that one needs the loco to run round meant that some of the shunting was quite challenging! I also found that one of the uncoupling magnets was wrongly sited which meant it left the wagon fouling the points needed to run round. It will need to be moved! It isn’t until one uses the layout in earnest that one discovers the design faults.
Nicks workshop mutterings 