Armed with the plan, Dave Lowery picks up the challenge of modelling the lofty cliffs...
-
Well, this is a little different to the rolling hills and dales that I usually model. Height is the byword on Paul A. Lunn’s inspirational diagram. The base is simple enough to build – a small 3ft by 2ft open frame baseboard. It called for a simple river running in a mountainous gorge, crossed by a single railway line cut into the rocks and mountains. With Christmas almost upon us, I decided to show you how to use the excess expanded polystyrene packaging you’ll get free with your presents, as well as the usual plaster bandage approach – so there is a choice of techniques that you might like to try.
1 Glue (using white PVA wood glue) and screw pieces of 2in by 1in timber together to make a simple 3ft by 2ft frame. This makes it wide enough so that the river can wander its way through the gorge.
3 The only ‘structural’ pieces are the abutments for the Peco LK-10 bridge girders. Cut the abutments from a strip of pine, forming a roughly triangular shape. Cover in brick or stone paper, or embossed plastic.
2 The next stage is to cut the base for both the riverbed and the trackbed. The former is made from a strip of MDF, while the latter is crafted from 12mm plywood.
The trackbed needs to be elevated above the river. It’s supported on 100mm-tall pieces of 2in by 1in timber. Glue the supports in place with PVA wood glue. 4
6 You can leave the edges of the polystyrene straight if you like, as I did, to represent rock strata, with vegetation sprinkled along the edges…
5 To make the polystyrene mountains. I layered strips of polystyrene insulation board I bought from B&Q, gluing them together with Diall Coving Adhesive and Filler, also from B&Q.