Model weather
Chris Leigh wanted to reprise one of the cover scenes he built for Model Railway Constructor back in December 1965. Can he do it with modern models and materials?
Chris Leigh reprises one of the covers he made back in 1965!
Ithink my model-making career had a pretty unusual start. When I joined Model Railway Constructor in autumn 1963, the magazine had started to use cover photographs of models built in-house, rather than pictures of contributors’ layouts or scratchbuilt locomotives. One of the first that I recall was a snow scene. It featured one of Assistant Editor David Percival’s locomotives, fitted with a snowplough and embedded in a large ‘drift’ of Ajax cleaning powder! For the next couple of years Colin Gifford produced the ideas for the cover illustrations, while I had the job of making the models. The pictures were, of course, in black and white. The strengths of Colin’s style of photography were both the composition and the contrast of light and dark. He also wanted ‘life’ in the pictures, so I often had to provide movement, smoke or working lights – or occasionally all three! The challenges were interesting. A panned photograph of a moving locomotive proved unsatisfactory, so the picture was re-planned with the locomotive (except for its wheels) stationary and the rest of the scenery moving (April 1965 issue). The locomotive, its motor removed so that the wheels turned freely, was held by string attached to a nearby filing cabinet. The diorama, which featured mainly track and wagons, was rested on several pieces of a sawn-up broom handle. As the camera shutter fired on an exposure of several seconds, the diorama was simply moved an inch or two on its broom-handle rollers.
SMOKE AND MIRRORS
Many of the pictures involved a degree of subterfuge in order to create a specific effect and that was all part of the fun, though I’m not sure that I considered it fun at the time! It was certainly quite stressful, with my limited modelling experience (I was still a teenager) having to produce something which pleased someone who wasn’t really familiar with what was possible with the limited time and resources available. Occasionally, a complete rebuild was needed before everyone was happy. Black and white photography simplified some aspects of the modelling, and this was certainly true of one picture which has long been a particular favourite of mine. The December issue always had a Christmas theme, but we felt that snow scenes were ‘old hat’. Someone suggested ‘rain’ and the theme developed into a ‘cold, wet, night at a big station’. Trix had just produced a ‘Western’. For its day it was passable, if you hid the bogies and, what’s more, it had working lights. One of the great things about the Gifford cover pictures was that I did not have to model
anything that wasn’t going to be seen in the finished picture. In essence, I was building one picture in three dimensions. The main problem was that I was never quite certain what would or would not be seen through the camera lens. This was even true of the photographer because we used a Rollei twin-lens reflex camera. The picture was viewed through the upper lens but actually taken through the lower one. From memory, only those features which were between 14in and 18in in front of the lens would be in focus. With 12 exposures on a roll of film, we would take all 12 and, fingers crossed, everything would come together OK on at least one of them. If not, there might need to be a re-take, often with some alteration to the model to help overcome the problem. The December 1965 cover was the epitome of this. Loosely based on Bristol Temple Meads, there was the ‘Western’ and one Mk 1 coach. The platform was a plank of wood and there was a short length of home-made canopy using Airfix parts. A train of unlit carriages provided the ‘barrier’ at the left of the scene. Lighting was provided by grain-of-wheat bulbs, the smallest available bulb in those days. The impression of the great glass train shed was the work of Ian Allan’s resident artist, Vic Welch. He is best known for some very detailed water colours of steam locomotives used in publications, and particularly on the covers of the ‘Abc’ locomotive books. For us, he produced nothing more complex than a sketch, chalked in white on black card.
ON REFLECTION
Perhaps the most important part is the reflection on the wet platform. We struggled to create it and eventually I bought a bottle of glycerine, which provided enough gloss for the effect that Colin wanted. It did, however, mean that the wet, sticky platform had to go straight in the bin afterwards! Thankfully, more suitable materials have appeared in the last 50 years. I still have the original print from which that cover was produced, and Editor Richard Foster asked if I could produce a modern version of it, using currently available models and materials. Though I’ve diverged from that original in some respects, and I’ve made changes which are necessary for the demands of a colour photograph, rather than black and white, much of the original methodology still holds true. As a model-maker, I could never be completely certain what the photographer would do in terms of camera angle and lighting. Dioramas such as this need to accommodate last-minute changes made by the photographer and, in this respect, model-making for a single photograph differs considerably from building a layout. The constructional techniques remain the same, though, as do methods of creating detail, atmosphere and the weather feature. Unlike snow, which you can vacuum away afterwards, there is no removing the wet look, so if you do this on your layout you’re stuck with it. However, Britain is generally wet at least half the time, yet we rarely see a ‘wet’ layout. I’m going to split the step-by-step section into segments, the main part being the construction of the diorama in order to replicate that original photograph, with smaller sections relating to some of the techniques used to create the lighting and the ‘wet-look’.