PLANNING AND MAKING THE SEA WALL

When first asked to make the sea wall, my initial intent was to model it out of Foamex. Foamex is light and can be easily bent and scribed, both attributes necessary for what was wanted.

As it turned out, this approach proved unworkable as the sea wall front is not flat vertically and trying to bend it both horizontally to follow the coastline and vertically to get the correct shape of the wall was impossible without the wall gaping in places. An alternative was decided upon, which was to cut the sea walls from XPS foam. This is a lightweight, closed-cell foam that is easily cut and sanded and, while quite rigid, it is also moderately flexible. The line of the track had been decided upon. That line was transferred to the foam and cut out.

The body of the sea wall was then glued with PVA to a thin strip at the back to form the small wall separating the footpath on the top of it from the railway track and ballast behind. Pins were used to hold the back wall in place while the glue dried, to keep the back wall tight against the footpath.

Once the glue was dried, a mix of Artex, black acrylic paint and a few drops of PVA were applied to small lengths of the wall. The reason for only doing small lengths at a time with the Artex mix was that, while the mix was still soft, it had to be scribed with the stonework. Given the size of the stones and the time taken, this proved quite a strain on the eyesight and was best done a bit at a time. The bricks were scribed into the soft mix with a scalpel blade, which proved difficult to get a consistently thin layer of Artex on the foam and particularly so on the front of the wall where it curved. In addition, where the Artex was thick, the scribe lines were too deep and called for careful sanding. For the front curve, a strip of sandpaper was wrapped around a piece of old broomstick, which proved to be about the right curvature.

Once scribed and sanded, the section was carefully brushed off to remove any dust and then sealed with a coat of acrylic primer.

Painting the stonework in acrylic paint proved to be a laborious process as reference to pictures of the sea wall showed that not only was each stone a slightly different tone to its neighbour but also that the colour of the stone varied according to the time of day and the weather.

One feature of one of the walls was a set of steps leading down to the beach with some railings at the side. Initially, it was intended to model these as one piece with the sea wall, but as the steps are occasionally partially covered at high tide, it was decided to produce two separate sets of steps, which would be fastened to the beach, allowing for one of them to be partially hidden by our ‘sea’ when depicting high tide. The railings were 3D-printed on a filament printer and the steps were resin-printed.