SNOW BUSINESS

Owing to changes in our family circumstances, I recently had to dismantle an ‘L’-shaped end-to-end layout which took up a whole spare bedroom and had taken over five years to build. However, domestic authorities kindly allowed me to have several shelves for my hobby in the guest bedroom. The layout I have built over the past six months is a fictitious halt on the Tanat Valley branch, which ran from Oswestry (Shropshire) to Llangynog in North Wales.

The baseboards were recycled from my previous layout and resized to fit the shelf. The backscene was painted onto a window blind (a tip I picked up from a layout featured in Model Rail) based on images of Blodwell Junction. This allowed me to play around with the composition of the scene to get the best transition from 3D model to 2D backscene.

The buildings are all Wills/ratio kits, which helped to speed the build along, although my preferred method would have been to scratchbuild. The overbridge is scratchbuilt from card, polystyrene and DAS modelling clay and is based on a real structure at Blodwell junction.

Early in the build, my wife requested that the layout be ‘pretty’, since it will be in our guest bedroom. This led to the idea of building a winter scene which was a new challenge for me.

The snow products used were from the Precision Ice and Snow range (www.precisioniceandsnow. com) and I am very pleased with the results.

With such a small layout and so many good scenic items salvaged from my previous layout, it has taken lots of self discipline to keep the scene sparse, with only one figure and one road vehicle. The Tanat Valley line closed to passengers after the Second World War, so I’ve modelled the halt as no longer in use (although I do run the odd passenger train). The line also served various quarries, so the line in the foreground forms a small quarry exchange siding, giving me the excuse to run an industrial locomotive.

Jake Madin, Scarborough