St James's Station

Thanks Gary the garage does look quite good once you add some drums and people and of course vehicles.
The small items are from the Woodlands Scenics range. I bought them three or more years ago and am glad to finally be able to use them.
I used a section of black plastic tubing from a trickle irrigation system to make some tyres and will continue to add general junk to the area as I find things on my travels. A fence will look good too I think. I've got brass tubing to make fence posts and can use wire mesh fly screen as the fencing wire. A bit of solder a spray of paint and that should do the job nicely. I'll write that down on the ever growing , never shrinking , list of great things to do on the layout.

Gary wrote:

 

Thanks Ed.
When I look at the kit it's hard to imagine it as three sheets of paper in a Hornby magazine a week ago.
The Scalescenes kits really do look the business when built.
I've not weathered the garage yet and that will be a job to do one afternoon. Once that's done it should look better as the roof is quite glossy. In fact I might even upgrade the roof to a Gormominium one. (Gormo this is the trademark name that I'm suggesting for your fantastic aluminium bbq tray interlocking composite roofing system) or G.A.B.T.I.C.R.S as we in the industry know it. Try saying that five times after a few special waters.
In fact the more I think about it the more I'm liking the idea of the Gormominium roof. It will really finish it off quite nicely.
And if I use the rolled edge of the tray it will make a ready made gutter.
Right I'm off to Coles to buy a bbq tray!

ed wrote:

 

Hi Toto, thank you very much for choosing my photo. As I said earlier on the page the items are all from the Woodlands Scenics range. I really like the little jack stands too. They are too nice to have hidden inside the shed so I thought outside next to the door would work nicely.
As I was saying to one of my neighbours on Sunday when he came over for his fortnightly progress inspection,the grand plan for the layout is to have wonderful scenery and lots of little dioramas and cameo scenes. The trains running past them is secondary.

The thing that always sticks in my mind about the great British layouts that I saw on my travels to England is that the trains are really secondary to the whole layout. It's more about having little snapshots of life and that's what I've tried to do with the Scalescenes garage photos.

As modellers we are restricted mainly to the static model so we need to be artistic and inventive to give the impression that life is busily going on and the viewer has just been given a Polaroid photo of the scene they are looking at. (I hope that's not too deep and existential, I was up till very late this morning with work so haven't had my normal sleep)

Seriously though I do want to keep creating little snapshots of life on my layout and looking at what others on this and other forums constantly inspires me.
Cheers Steve

Toto wrote:

 

StevePower wrote:

Right, so I'm home for the day and can now upload those photos as promised above..
A $3.00 bottle of black acrylic poster paint works a treat. It is enough to block out the light and stop the building glowing at night like a Chernobel street in the 80s and 90s and 2000s and.......
The good thing too is I can always paint another colour over the top and give the houses a standard wall colour. If I was to do that it would have to be on a day where I had absolutely nothing else to do on the layout. So that should be in about ten years.

 

Toto wrote:

Yes that is about half of the Resin buildings that are on the layout. I was very fortunate to be able to buy them many years ago so my collection is much larger than I would have been able to justify had I been buying them these days.

 

Home again for a few days so it was into the train room for the afternoon and evening.
I wanted to finish off the lighting panel before I started working on another project. My order of Zimo Sound Chips and speakers arrived last week so I am going to be busy fitting all of those this week.

So I finished off the panel complete with LEDs and I have to say I'm quite happy with the result.
I will print a label card for it tomorrow.

 

Kimbo wrote:

Thanks Kim. The photos aren't great quality.I will have to take the SLR and tripod in I think.

 

Toto wrote:

Sure thing, I will try and photograph it as I go along. Kimbo is the real expert though, so maybe he can point out all of the mistakes and it will be a "What Not to do " tutorial.

 

So it's been two months since an update and a lot has happened in the trainroom.
The 9 Zimo MX645R Sound Decoders and speakers I bought from Digitrains in Lincoln, East Midlands arrived in August. However it was over a month before I installed any of them.
To date I have installed a decoder, speaker and nano leds into 2 Battle of Britains, 1 West Country and 1 Q1. Which now leaves a 4MT, J94, Terrier, Jinty, Black 5. And I've just ordered three more MX645Rs to do a few more locos.
I was also able to get hold of a multicolour led strip light for the room. It broke within a few minutes of installing it, but some handy soldering saw it up and running again. This now gives me some nice backlighting at night and seems to make the building and yard lights look even better. I will try and et some good photos of the locos and the new mood lighting and post them here.

 

Battle of Britain Class '92 Sqn' rounds the bend toward the station.

 

Out of the evening fog appears the Light Pacific.

 

The 9F ready for duty.

 

Waiting on the Turntable for the all clear.