Anthony A Reeves - Modelling Railway Scenery Volume 2: Fields, Hedges and Trees

First published in 2015 by

The Crowood Press Ltd

Ramsbury, Marlborough

Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-book first published in 2015

Anthony Reeves 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84797 944 5

Disclaimer

The author and the publisher do not accept any responsibility in any manner whatsoever for any error or omission, or any loss, damage, injury, adverse outcome, or liability of any kind incurred as a result of the use of any of the information contained in this book, or reliance upon it. If in doubt about any aspect of scenic modelling, readers are advised to seek professional advice.

Dedication

For Nic, Luke, Libby and Benson and my family, past, present and future: Thank you for putting up with me and for your continued support, cheers!

Acknowledgements

The author and publisher would like to thank the following companies for their generous support in the making of this book: AK Interactive, Deluxe Materials, Javis Manufacturing Ltd, Noch, TREEMENDUS. Special thanks to Andy York and BRM magazine for the additional photography.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION WHY LANDSCAPE?

Having been born in 1967, I missed out on the steam era of British railways. I grew up in a time of diesel and electric locomotives and have seen a number of the classes I grew up with disappear from service as they themselves are relegated to the history books.

One element of rail travel that does stay constant however, other than its seasonal change and the occasional intervention of man, is the countryside the trains pass through. I have always had a fascination with scenery and what it consists of both in the real world and in the scale model world. I have always studied the scenery and the structures railways run through and how the landscape, structures and railways have a profound effect on each other.

My passion for the scenic elements of railway modelling has encouraged me to develop the TREEMENDUS range of scenic modelling materials, which are used by modellers worldwide. This is my second book on the subject of how to accurately create convincing scale model scenery following Modelling Railway Scenery Volume 1 Cuttings, Hills, Mountains, Streams and Lakes (Crowood, 2013). I hope this new publication brings you enjoyment and inspires you to improve your own scenic modelling skills.

For the many thousands of railway modellers in the UK, and indeed worldwide, it is the locomotives, rolling stock, permanent way and railway-related buildings that are the most important and interesting aspects of a model railway and of course without these features there would be no railway at all.

Playing with trains has come a long way since the days of so-called carpet railways: these were essentially steam engines that ran directly on the floor without the use of a track. Table-top railways were later introduced, with clockwork and then electric-powered locomotives running on primitive-looking, unrealistic track; the latter was an improvement on the previous clockwork engines, but the trains were still toy-like and used basiclooking accessories.

Fig. 1: Its not difficult to see the attraction for railway modellers of recreating scenes like this in scale model form.

Fig. 2: By taking note of natural features in the real world our model railways can be made to look very lifelike.

Today as advances are continually being made in the quality of almost all areas of railway modelling, with fantastically detailed stock and realistic digital sound commonplace in all the popular scales available, it is becoming more and more desirable to run railways through a landscape worthy of the trains themselves. As a wide choice of stock is readily available for almost every region and era of British railways, there are obvious reasons for wanting to faithfully re-create landscape which is recognizably typical of a particular region of the country, or even to copy the features of a chosen stretch of railway line as it appears in the real world.

Fig. 3: Irwell Vale Halt, Irwell Vale, East Lancashire Railway, BL0 0QA (June 2013).

The East Lancashire Railway

The East Lancashire Railway is a heritage railway that spans two counties, Lancashire and Greater Manchester; it is situated in the northwest of England, and more commonly referred to as the East Lancs Railway. The East Lancs Railway currently (May 2014) operates a 12-mile (19km) stretch of railway between Rawtenstall and Heywood, on which it runs a mixture of steam and diesel-hauled trains.

In my first book Modelling Railway Scenery Volume 1 Cutting, Hills, Mountains, Streams and Lakes, individual dioramas were made to show the various aspects of the landscape being modelled. Modelling Railway Scenery Volume 2 Fields, Hedges and Trees is presented in a different way. In this book you are advised as to the best way to collect information from a particular location, which you can refer to at a later date; in this case I have studied a stretch of railway line running through Lancashire which is part of the East Lancashire Railway.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

The aim of this book is to guide the reader through the process of collecting photographic information and converting the information within the photographs, through the use of step-by-step demonstrations, into scale model scenic features for your own model railway layouts.

The book starts with a field trip on a sunny June day to the area surrounding Irwell Vale Halt, a small station on the East Lancs Railway. Whilst on the field trip a huge amount of colour reference photographs were taken, and these photographs served as reference to the colour, shape and size of the scenic features in the area, as well as the important smaller details that make up the scenes in the photographs; many of the photographs can be seen in the following chapters.

Fig. 4: Landscape features such as this small hawthorn are just waiting to be modelled.

The important features of the landscape are recreated in step-by-step format using readily available scenic modelling materials with accompanying full colour photographs of both the prototype and the various stages of creating a scale model version. Although Modelling Railway Scenery Volume 2 is aimed at 1:76 scale, or OO modellers, the various techniques and materials can be used for most of the commonly modelled scales the principles of creating the scenic features are the same, it is a simple matter of scaling the size of the hedges, trees and so on up or down to complement the scale of the rolling stock and buildings that appear on the layout.