Saturday Film Club: Triang Battlespace mega layout

As mentioned yesterday, I love a bit of Triang. Top of the pops has to be the Battle Space range of operating accessories and I've never seen a better display than this seen at a show in Perth. 

You can keep all your finescale rubbish - give me a couple of Turbo cars circulating on high level tracks!

Get your voting fingers ready!

It's voting time for a couple of important contests. 

The BRM Cakebox Challenge

49 entrants can be seen here. Please take a look at each one, pick three and jot down their numbers. Then head over to the voting page to make your choices.

All the entries are impressive and inspirational with really clever ideas that we can all take back to our own modelling efforts. I'm pleased that the competition has turned several lapsed modellers into active modellers again.

The Wishlist Poll

The Poll Team put a terrific amount of work in each year to create a poll of prototypes that modellers would like to see appear as RTR products. While no manufacturer will use this as their only guide when planning ranges for the future, it certainly plays a part and it's interesting to see how many new models appear that have been placed high on this list.

Vote in The Wishlist Poll. 

Garden Rail November

Present me with some Isle of Man Railways for a Garden Rail article and you can be sure I'll bite. Our main feature this month is a beautiful selection of IOM models on their owners layout.

Carrying on the theme, I've finally turned my sketch notes for the Manx station huts into something approaching a drawing. As a potential model, they have loads of applications for anyone not looking for a grand station. Very scratchbuildable too.

I'm also pleased to be able to publish an article on building the Garden Railway Specialists Garratt kit. Sadly, it's not me who built it, but maybe I'll get to do it one day...

All this and much more in Garden Rail November 2018.

Warehouse Wednesday: North Woolwich Station

Looking rather ramshackle now, North Woolwich station is a pretty standard example of Great Eastern Railway architecture. You'll see derivatives of this building dotted around their territory. Railway companies like to find a style and stick to it, or at least some of them did.

The building used to be home to the Great Eastern Railway Museum, but this closed in 2008. The exhibits have been dispersed to other establishments, but it's a shame the museum closed. To be honest, there's precious little else to head to this side of the Thames for.

Hopefully, the building will find a sympathetic new owner. Probably some sort of apartment block, but maybe the conversion will be carried out by someone with the same sort of imagination as did Wolverhampton Low Level station.

Weathering an MDF loco is harder than it looks

Adding a bit of dirt to the Hunslet, pretty much essential as the faded yellow was still VERY bright, was supposed to be simple. Blow earth colour around the bottom, blackish over the top and track colour pretty much everywhere.Just like I do for everything else I build for the railway world.

The end result looked a bit flat. Maybe I should have given the yellow a coat of satin varnish to make it pop a bit more, maybe I didn't clean out the paint cup properly and the earth colour took the edge of the others, but I wasn't really happy.

Wanting a bit of dirty hanging around the detail, I tried a wash of Agrax Earthshade shading ink. On the sideframes it looked good so I went for it over the rest of the body. Normally, it's paint on, wipe off. Here, it soaked into the surface a bit so I had to wipe quickly. Another reason I should have varnished the yellow.

After that, a bit of dry-brushing and I'm reasonably happy.

The figure by the way is a Kara's character. I do like his stance, leaning out of the cab. A bit more lively than most.