At the right hand side of my layout the road runs right along the backscene and I needed something to breakup the join between land and sky. I had thought about a row of hedges but I don't think I've left enough room, so I decided to use a drystone wall instead.
On the way home from work on Thursday I had a look through the options in my local model shop. While they had a number of options in the end I settled for the Hornby granite wall pack. Having moved to modelling in N gauge I didn't think I'd be buying anything from Hornby again, but this item comes from their 9mm scale Lyddle End range. I believe that this small range was a "toe in the water" to test the marker which obviously wasn't very successful as they have now discontinued the range. In the pack you get 8 identical straight wall pieces and four corner pieces. Unfortunately, having got the pack home, there are a number of problems, fortunately none of them are insurmountable.
Firstly the colour is not right. Remember I'm modelling an area with a dark satanic mill so walls will be covered in soot etc. When I bought them I assumed that they were actually unpainted, but on closer inspection it appears that they are lightly painted (a dark wash in some of the joins, and green highlighting for moss). This isn't a problem as I'll simply repaint them when I paint other rocks on the layout so that it looks as if local stone was used to build the wall.
The more troublesome issue is that the sections of wall don't fit together very well. I only need a short section of wall (less than 2 pieces in length), and so I've chosen the two pieces that fit the best but that still leaves a rather large hole in the wall (you can see daylight through it even in the photo). Fortunately a little bit of milliput worked into the gap with a cocktail stick fixes this problem, and once the wall is repainted it should be fine.
As you can see I've already cut the left hand connecting piece of so that it will match up against the bridge parapet, but I'll wait to cut the other end until the scenery is finished to make sure it goes all the way to the edge of the board.
It'll be fine. Looks a grand wall.
ReplyDeleteI must admit that for all their faults, the actual stone work is really well modelled and should look really good once it's painted to match.
DeleteThese days a perfect wall is a rarity anyway.
ReplyDeletetrue, although that big a hole in a dry stone wall and I think it would have fallen over.
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