My modelling time has been consumed over the last couple of weeks with a pile of projects for Hornby Magazine's latest layout - St Stephens Road.
If you have been following them on Facebook then you will have seen the layout develop from baseboards to ballasted track, acquire some wiring and now some buildings. These arrived with me a few weeks ago in a big box which contained some smaller boxes from Ratio.
On Friday, I dropped off the finished models in the palatial offices of this august publication and plonked them on the layout. My contribution is the station, canopy, signal box, platelayers hut, goods shed and loading bank. A rather larger effort than I'd thought when asked. The kits go together OK, although there are a few wrinkles which you can read about in the articles, but if you want to do a good job, take time.
I reckon that each main building took around 8-10 hours to construct. Much of this is down to painting the stonework which takes ages, but these apparently simple structures turn out to be more complex and detailed than expected. That said, the result are worth the effort. I'm particularly keen on the signal box and could easily be persuaded to do another one, especially if I was allowed more time to put an interior inside it.
Considering these kits have bee around since the dawn of time, I was pleasantly surprised how nice the end results look. Well worth a look. Now all I have to do is sort out 200+ photos and write some words. That's next week taken care of !
2 comments:
It's remarkable how complex even utilitarian buildinge were in those days. I guess it shows how much (cheap) craftsmanship was availble to the railway companies...
I think there was an element of pride that was displayed via quality buildings. If you look at a lot of old factory or bank premises, there will be elaborate stone or brick work that was intended to show solidity. We don't do this nowadays, fancy architecture tends towards the temporary. This signal box and the other buildings were solidly built because the builders thought they would be there a long while.
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