Modelling Lives

Folk musician Anna Bass on the beauty of a simple layout and her prowess with cardboard.

Igrew up in the Sixties, and although my mum was a feminist, society hadn’t yet reached the point where people asked girls if they wanted a model railway. It never occurred to me to even ask for one. But I’ve always liked the idea of miniature worlds. My love of trains has grown gradually from that first exciting train ride to London when I was four or five; I spent two decades living in North America, where passenger trains are few and far between, but immense freight trains a hundred boxcars long snake romantically through the desert.

Back then I wasn’t thinking about model railways – I just liked trains! – but when my partner Ray and I found ourselves playing and singing at Pecorama in Devon as part of a charity music event, we had a look around the layouts afterwards and I was entranced. Ray had prior experience of modelling in ‘N’ gauge but had never really been happy with the result; we decided we ought to try building a layout together.

It took a few years before we actually did it.

We live in a tiny house, with nowhere to have a model railway room – but in any case we both thought it would be good to have the model railway in the middle of things. The solution, of course, was to build a coffee table layout.

We selected ‘N’ gauge because it allowed us to squeeze quite a bit of scenery into a small space, and found we naturally fell into modelling roles, with Ray mainly doing the large-scale landscaping while I set about constructing cardboard kits. The very first thing I built was a road bridge across the railway – it took me ages and I was very proud of it when I’d finished. We placed it on the layout – which by then had track – and ran our one and only train (a ‘Devon Riviera Express’ with a ‘Warship’ towing a couple of carriages, which had come out of a starter kit) through it. Unrealistically tight turns are a compromise when the railway is built inside a 2ft by 4ft coffee table… and the train hung up on the bridge. Ray turned to me and uttered the immortal words, “Can you make it a bit wider?”

At first I was horrified – my beautiful creation; how could he even ask? – but it turned out to be something of a liberating experience. I gritted my teeth and sawed the bridge in half down the middle, and discovered that by careful application of cardboard, leftover bits of ‘stonework’ from the kit, and paint, I could make the bridge look perfectly good… but wider.

I made a lot of cardboard kit buildings in the process of putting that layout together, and I learned how a bit of weathering makes a building come alive. I also scratchbuilt a greenhouse; my first ever scratchbuild.

When we inevitably decided to build an exhibition layout, we thought it would be good to have scratchbuilt buildings. We based the station on Dullingham, near Newmarket. I was used to building in cardboard, so I started with a cereal box and off I went. It took a good couple of months but I was pleased with the result. Since then, I’ve constructed several more buildings for that first exhibition layout, ‘Ambleton Vale’, and several others for a second exhibition layout, ‘White Meadow Quarry’. My favourite, I think, is the pub on ‘White Meadow Quarry’.

The process starts with a web search to get a sense of how I want a building to look – I’m not an architect, and designing buildings is not something I feel competent doing! Then I draw a floor plan straight on to a cardboard box (cereal boxes are ideal – not too thin, not too thick, although some are coarser and don’t work as well). Because I’m not trying to replicate an existing building, I get an idea of scale from looking at my guide images, and I always keep an ‘N’ gauge person handy for reference as I’m going along. Once I have the 3D structure in cardboard, I cover it with brick paper, assemble the parts and add roofs and chimneys. There’s a great thrill in seeing the building develop its own personality. I never throw anything away – I’ve got a box full of useful remnants from card kits and previous buildings.

As well as buildings, I like to model cameo scenes and other small details of the scenery, and

I enjoy weathering rolling stock. Not long ago, I also built an entire ‘N’ gauge diorama inside an A4 box file, for a contest.

I really enjoy running the layouts, especially the run-round on Platform 1 at ‘Ambleton Vale’, which fascinates younger viewers if they haven’t seen it done before. In a reversal of generally expected roles, Ray sometimes gets chatting with the spectators at a show, leaving me to run the layout by myself – which persons of a certain generation often find surprising. Or, as one onlooker put it, “You’re a bit unusual, aren’t you?”

We thought it would be good to have scratchbuilt buildings, so I started with a cereal box and off I went

Modeller CV: Anna Bass is a laser safety advisor based in North Essex. She sings and plays as part of folk duo Bass & Taylor and also rides horses as often as possible. You’ll be able to see more of ‘White Meadow Quarry’ layout in MR293.