Scottish Crates

Having built a loading dock alongside the factory siding I need something to load. Fortunately I'd already sourced something appropriate on my trip to Edinburgh.

When I arrived in Edinburgh I had the afternoon to kill, so rather than heading straight to my hotel I took a slight detour to visit Harburn Hobbies. My reason for visiting the shop was to see their Harburn Hamlet range of N gauge accessories, and after careful consideration I came away with a stack of wooden crates (item number HN 606).

While the stack looks quite good placed on the loading dock, it is also perfectly sized to fit within the open goods wagons meaning I can move it around the layout if I want to. Now of course I need to populate the layout with workers to make the scene more realistic.

My Eye View

I've now added some scenery to all of Jerusalem (I haven't necessarily finished doing this but it now looks a lot more natural) and while I'll probably go into the details in later posts I thought I'd show you roughly what I see when I sit back and enjoy the view from my study chair.

This isn't a perfect copy of my view due to the lens on the camera curving the image somewhat (also it is slightly overexposed so the grass is darker), but it should give you a fairly good idea of what I'm currently looking at.

Nephelococcygia

Now I know that when it comes to seeing shapes in clouds (which is apparently called Nephelococcygia) not everyone always sees the same thing. So does anyone else see Max von Sydow's excellent portrayal of Ming the Merciless from the 1980 film version of Flash Gordon (the one with the excellent Queen soundtrack) in this bit of sky from the temporary clouds on Jerusalem?

Personally I can see the eyebrows, moustache, beard and the cowl around the back of his head. Can anyone else see this or am I just going insane?

Drive Safely

Not a train, or railway, in sight in today's post. What you are looking at is the road leading away from the factory which bends to the right over the railway and out of Jerusalem. As you can see I've done some more scenic work, specifically hiding the end of the drystone wall and grassing the slope to the left of the road. The main new item is the speed limit sign. Unlike the "Beware of the Trains" sign, I bought this one which is from a set of pre-1960's road signs made by Ancorton Models.

Health And Safety: The Missing Details

The previous post was meant to be more than just a single photo, there was meant to be some textual content as well; specifically details on how I made the "Beware Of The Trains" sign. Unfortunately I managed to press Publish instead of Preview! So here are the details behind the making of the sign.

While I'm sure I could have bought a Beware of the Trains sign I decided that it was simple enough for me to have a go at making my own; after all it's only two colours, how hard can it be. The major problem is the size of the sign. The sign is approximately 3.5mm wide by 2.5mm tall. This means that the large letters are written in a 2.4pt font! Given that 10pt font is considered small you should be able to get a good idea just how small the letters are. If not then these photos should help.

The first photo really gives a good sense of the scale of the sign, it also shows that laser printed ink actually rubs off quite quickly! To stop this happening I painted on a thin layer of Humbrol enamel satin varnish before I tried handling the printed area. The printed and varnished paper was then stuck to some thin black cardboard (it's probably around 200gsm) and then carefully cut out using a sharp knife.

I made the post from some 0.6mm wire (the same stuff I used on the trees). I cut a piece about 1.4cm long to give me a 5 foot post (at 2mm to the foot that is 1cm) plus 4mm to go into the layout surface. I held the wire in a pin vice while I painted it with Tamiya flat black. Once the paint was dry, I used a cocktail stick to put a tiny drop of superglue on the back of the sign and then glued it to the post. Once the glue had set I gave the whole thing another thin coat of satin varnish. The final step was to drill a small hole (0.65mm drill bit) into the layout and slide the post in.

If you fancy making your own sign then feel free to re-use the SVG file I created (I've included both a white on black and a black on white sign). I did try converting the SVG to a more common format (like a PNG or a PDF) but in everycase the converted file lost too much detail making the small letters unreadable. I'd suggest opening the file with Inkscape and printing at the highest quality setting your printer can manage.

Health And Safety

From Roots To Branches

Given that I'm not modelling a windswept Hebridean island (although there is at least one person who does) Jerusalem is going to need some trees. Now I've never been a fan of ready to plant trees. They are either conifers modelled as perfect cones or deciduous trees that look more like a green ball on a stick. Even the kits for building trees don't really inspire me; the trunk looks very plasticy and the resulting tree is still very regular looking. What I wanted was some straggly looking trees that were all different but similar.

I've recently been reading through John de Frayssinet's excellent Sceneic Modelling book in which he suggests using sagebrush to create very natural looking trees. Now firstly I don't have any sagebrush plants and secondly John models in 4mm to the foot, and so his trees would be a little big for Jerusalem. It did, however, get me thinking that maybe there was something in the garden that would work.

As this year we have had a reasonable summer we have done quite a bit of work in the garden. This has included removing a number of shrubs that had gone berserk at the back of the garden. I'm not entirely sure what the shrub is but it spreads by putting out underground runners and these runners, cut into bits, looked fairly tree like to my eyes. As the roots went into the recycling bin I cut off the bits that looked promising and left them to dry out. Once dry they were microwaved for about 30 seconds to make sure they (and anything on them) were very dead.

So, yesterday, armed with some dead roots, I set about making some trees. This is essentially a simple four step process, which you can probably figure out from these handy step by step illustrations.

Firstly you need to find the appropriate bits of root. Each root then has a pin inserted into its base to allow it to be easily added to the layout; I used some 0.6mm wire that I had laying around and drilled a 0.65mm hole in each root. The wire was fixed with a small dab of superglue and left to dry. Once the roots were ready I added them to a temporary base (just a push fit into a hole, no glue). The tops of the trees were then sprayed with a matt varnish (specifically Winsor & Newton Artists' Matt Varnish). This makes them very sticky at which point I rolled the tree in Woodland Scenics Medium Green Course Turf. I then allowed the varnish to dry before repeating the process at least once to add more body to the foliage. When I was happy with the tree I then sprayed it with varnish again and sprinkled over some Woodland Scenics Green Blend Blended Turf to add a little colour variation. If you ignore drying time each tree probably took less than five minutes to make.

Once the trees are fully dry I then touch up any areas of the trunk where the bark has rubbed off with small dabs of RailMatch acrylic Sleeper Grime which seems to match the trunk colour quite well. A small hole (0.65mm again) is then drilled in the layout and the tree carefully positioned. I'll probably glue the trees in eventually but for now they are just a push fit so that I can remove them to work on the grass underneath and around them. So here is another shot of the front right corner of the layout with the trees in place.