For some video work, I need a working model railway, and so decided to pull The Hellingly Hospital Railway out of storage.
All my layouts live in an insulated, but unheated storage container, and I've always concerned how well they will fare in there. I don't have the option to put them up in a nice, warm house as efforts to win the lottery have so far proved unsuccessful.
Anyway, the layout has been in the container, wrapped in an insulated bag, for at least 5 years since I last looked at it. First impressions were goo. The leaves are still on the trees, and apart from a little bit of fluffy mould (I think) on one branch, it survived well.
Except that when I unloaded the model from the car, I dropped one end of it two feet onto a gravel drive.
Much scrabbling around later, I dug up what I hope is all the little details that came lose.
The challenge is to match the detail to the blank spots on the ground.
Some PVA, a few weights and a few minutes work, and hopefully the model is as good as it ever was.
The big danger (!) is rodents. I had a layout nibbled by mice in the garage, the expanded polystyrene was good nesting material I guess.
ReplyDeleteRodents worry me, but the storage is a metal box so pretty mouse proof I hope.
ReplyDeleteIt just amazes me how many layouts you have built in the last few years Phol so I guess the container is well stacked!
ReplyDeleteToday's blog post - plus comments - have got me wondering.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that lots of people have had layouts in long term storage. When these layouts are retrieved, a number of them get repaired, refurbished and sometimes modified.
I don't know if some of this work could form the basis of interesting "magazine" print or video articles.
Whilst on the subject of models which have been retrieved from storage, I wonder if there might be any point in resurrecting an old "occasional feature" about refurbishing damaged models / sorting out botched kit builds.
A working title of "Kit Rescue" springs to mind. Although I'm not currently planning on pushing any examples under your nose at "Ally Pally" etc., I suspect that most of us are likely to have a number of botched/ unfinished kit builds hiding in cupboards.
I'm not thinking of kits that were always "unbuildable" (unfortunately there are far too many of these) - far from it.
Right now, I'm thinking about a white metal tram kit, on which I filed one panel too far and snapped another. I'm really wondering if DIY fixes for stuff like this could potentially interest some magazine readers.
Only a thought - probably not a very good one - but a thought, nonetheless.