Build a narrow gauge diorama
Chris Leigh reprises a cover diorama he built over 50 years ago, featuring one of the Festiniog Railway’s most iconic locations, the bridge at Tan-y-bwlch.
Chris Leigh remodels a cover diorama he built over 50 years ago, featuring one of the Festiniog Railway’s most iconic locations.
I’ve always liked the idea of building a diorama in order to take a single photograph. So much of railway modelling is about building or operating layouts, rather than model-making just for its own sake. When I started work at Model Railway Constructor in the autumn of 1963, magazine covers were two-colour affairs with a black and white photograph. The picture needed to be square and the best way to obtain a suitable picture was to take it yourself, having built a model which was relevant to that issue. Soon after I joined the magazine, Colin Gifford carried out a redesign, and from that moment I had the job of building dioramas in order to take just one cover photograph. Every picture tells a story, so they say, and there were stories of success, disaster, amusement, and often stress too. In the case of this picture, the story was, well, read on… I think it can now be told. After all, surely, there must be a statute of limitations on model railway articles that are a bit of a white lie? Back in August 1965, Model Railway Constructor published an article about my layout. Except it wasn’t a layout and the article wasn’t written by me. The collection of Festiniog Railway dioramas that I built – at age 19 – could easily have been a layout and Alan Williams, the editor at the time, drew up a plausible track plan that cunningly linked them together as a viable layout. The dioramas were built to show what could be done with the GEM range of FR locomotive and rolling stock kits. These were to the unusual scale of 5.5mm:1ft, running on ‘TT’ (12mm) gauge track, of which GEM was a major manufacturer at the time. GEM’S proprietor, George E. Mellor, was a genial gentleman of the old school and he had generously supplied us with kits for review.
PRINCE CHARMING
I had been quite captivated by the model of George England 0-4-0STT Prince. I had built the review kit (I think it was my first kit review) and my mother had taken it to the Carson Paripan paint factory, where she worked in the office. She got one of her colleagues in the paint lab to match the Festiniog green and spray the model, which they did in a gleaming gloss finish. As the ‘layout’ idea developed, Alan suggested that I should build a diorama
specifically for a cover photograph on which to show off the locomotive and one of the new carriage kits. I cannot now remember how much involvement our designer, the celebrated photographer Colin Gifford, had in choosing the subject for the diorama, but the cover picture taken in natural sunlight looks like one of Colin’s efforts. I’ve always liked model photographs that were taken in such natural conditions. We wanted an iconic location, and at that time the FR restoration had reached only as far as Tan-y-bwlch (which apparently translates as ‘Under The Gap’). However, immediately before the station the line crossed a narrow lane by means of a pretty cast-iron skew bridge, the main parts of which were made at the FR’S Boston Lodge foundry. The model bridge was cut from Slater’s Plastikard, the stone abutments were ‘carved’ in wet Polyfilla and the trees were from the Britains farm range. At that time there were few alternatives, and little or nothing by way of specialist modelling materials.
SPORTY NUMBER
The E-type Jag was a Dinky toy and probably slightly at odds with the rest of the scene, scale-wise. It had a ‘CJL 1’ numberplate. I don’t know what happened to Prince, the Fairlie, or any of the other models after I left Model Railway Constructor, some three years later,
but I’ve always thought the Festiniog Railway would make a lovely subject for a layout. Several years ago I decided that I would recreate the Tan-y-bwlch bridge diorama in a more up-to-date form and I started to gather the necessary items. The E-type Jag was the first acquisition. This is in 1:43 scale and, with the GEM models long out of production, I went shopping for a suitable locomotive and coach in ‘O-16.5’ gauge which would give me 1:43 scale trains running on 16.5mm gauge track. This is a better and more orthodox scale/gauge combination than the old GEM system, and it meant that car and train would be in matching scale. I had to work from reference pictures of the real thing, and not from my original model as I was uncertain, after all this time, how accurate I had been. I recalculated the main dimensions and came up with an embankment some 200mm high. By pure coincidence I calculated the gap for the bridge also at 200mm. It was only when I spotted a photograph of the real bridge with a height restriction sign that I realised just how far out my calculations had been. The road sign shows a height clearance of 13ft 6in, or 95mm. Measuring from the same photograph, I calculated the width of the road to be about the same, i.e. 13ft 6in. My 200mm gap will need to be closed quite considerably, but at this stage of the project that’s not a problem. I can raise the road
height quite simply with foam board, and the foam board bridge piers can be sized to reduce the width of the gap. An hour’s work one evening solved that problem and the reduced size of the gap looks much more authentic. I armed myself with several good photographs that I found on Google, and I thus had much better references than I had been able to find for the original model.