THE STORY’S IN THE PAPERWORK

There’s more to people than just poses. Researching railway documents will provide a lot of additional inspiration:

This label reveals an entire scenario: at least two escorts, possibly police officers, with a solitary prisoner, possibly handcuffed. Whatever the circumstances, there’s a human story here, and it would be easy to replicate with a small group of figures waiting at a station. BR’S ‘Send your Luggage by Rail’ pamphlet conjures up all manner of possibilities, from railway staff collecting cases from households, delivering them to hotels and guest houses, and loading/unloading them from vans. There are implications for the holidaying family too - no cases. On a subtler level, notice what everyone is doing: mum is keeping an eye on her daughter while dad buys the tickets. He’d also be the one carrying and fetching luggage, and so on. I love this extract from The Livestock Handbook, a set of instructions relating to the transport of livestock by rail and road, published by the Railway Clearing House in 1947. It’s full of best practice and procedures, details of the tasks involved and the tools/equipment used. Consider the implications for cattle wagons arising from the following snippets: “droppings… excretions… to be scraped and swept… and removed from the truck”. The truck should be “scrubbed and scoured with water”, and “washed with disinfectant”. The section on horseboxes is even more interesting. But what has all this got to do with railway modelling? It’s this prototypical information that dictates what your figures will look like and what they’ll be carrying you’d need scraping tools, brooms, wheelbarrows, hose pipes and stirrup pumps, not to mention canisters or bottles of disinfectant. From this you can work out the figure poses; scraping, sweeping, spraying, shovelling and stirring (mixing water and disinfectant). And with all this detail, there’s an opportunity to create an unusual yet extremely accurate scene of a handful of wagons, parked against a loading dock, with a group of staff in overalls undertaking such tasks.