How to improve a laser-cut kit
Pop-up Design’s laser-cut kits are strong and easy to assemble and sold to help a good cause. Chris Leigh shows how a little extra attention can make them great.
Sometimes a train of events leads to a discovery and a great story to tell. It teaches us that we, in the hobby media, can still learn a thing or two. The Model Rail/rapido ‘16XX’ led me to take an interest in the Dornoch branch, the Scottish light railway where 1646/49 replaced a Highland Railway 0-4-4T in 1959. I could find no railway history book on the Dornoch branch beyond the tiny booklet by Barry C. Turner. I took to social media to find out more and struck up an on-line conversation with Robert Shrives, a Highland Railway modeller who turned out to be a mine of information.
Robert pointed me in the direction of Pop-up Designs, the remarkable enterprise of husband and wife team (former Gordonstoun school teachers) Andy and Fiona Cox. Pop-up makes laser-cut wood gifts and ornaments and raises funds to support deprived children in some of the World’s poorest places.
Pop-up’s catalogue also includes some three dozen kits to build Scottish railway structures, designed by Iain Ross, and the newest addition to the list is Dornoch station, with I understand, the goods shed and engine shed expected to follow in due course. I couldn’t resist having a crack at it.
Laser-cut from 3mm thick plywood, the kits have a degree of chunkiness about them which might put off those seeking perfect scale appearance but with a little bit of extra work I found that the Dornoch station kit makes a charming little building that can hold its own alongside any of the established model railway kits.
Based on concepts to suit non-modellers, the Pop-up kits are easy to build, with
tab-and-slot construction and instructions which simply consist of photographs of every stage of assembly of the numbered parts. The only thing that laser-cutting can’t do is to create raised detail such as the vertical battens of the Highland Railway’s standard construction method, which are very obvious on the Dornoch building. The real station still stands and has been used for a variety of commercial purposes since its closure in 1960.
Examination of online photographs of the building as it is now confirmed that, in order to satisfy myself, I would need to add the vertical battens. Here, again, Robert Shrives’ advice proved invaluable. “Evergreen styrene sheet 4543 is your friend,” he said. The Evergreen sheet represents board-andbatten at appropriate spacing for the Highland Railway, and used as an overlay on Pop-up’s plywood walls, it produces a model which is strong and accurate in appearance. By cladding the plywood walls and slating the roof I could make a nice scale model.