Scenic Development

St Donats 1963 has very few structures, and only a single track to carry trains from one side of the diorama to the other. Consequently, the scenery and particularly the trees form an important part of the illusion of recession. Trees salvaged from Kyle of Sutherland are used here to help create a mock-up view of the diorama with an out-of-region goods passing through in the direction of Llantwit Major.

The choice of the horizon height, 5 inches above the baseline of the 13 inch deep viewing window, will be key for the success of the finished diorama. This will hopefully also be the natural viewing height, and is the height at which the photograph was taken, just slightly above the height of the mock-up mini-view pinned to the backscene. This is above the model height of the bridge and so I've artificially compressed the bridge perspective and “pointed up” the parapet towards the horizon.

At this stage the trees, scenery, bridge and track bed can all be removed in order to work on individual items away from the diorama.

Layout Mock-up

After three weeks of iterative improvement since the Missenden Weekend, I’ve more or less taken this one-third of scale mock-up as far as I can go. This is the view over the railway and the Bristol Channel.

       Looking across to Exmoor

I’ve learned a lot on this journey of discovery (that was the objective): the mock-up has been through a dozen or so rounds of “improve-photograph-critique”. Working at such a small scale, it’s been easy to make substantial structural changes along the way in order to reach this stage. However, at this scale, it’s also very difficult to make very accurate scenic elements: the castle and farm buildings are only a few millimetres high. And it’s difficult to photograph. At the scale distance I want the eventual layout to be viewed, this is as much of the layout as I can get into the frame.

All of which suggests the next model should be at full scale. Whether that’s another mock-up or the final layout I don’t yet know.



Pre-mock-up Mock-up

I’ve almost made a mock-up.

Under the guidance of Paul Bambrick at the Spring Railway Modellers Weekend at Missenden Abbey, I've taken my first steps towards making the St Donats layout. There’s lots to do, but I’ve now got something to look at, and here’s the first pic with “improvement notes” to guide the next steps.

The one-third scale mock-up is 9” deep and 12” wide. The “View Box” refers to the enclosing box with a cut-out to frame the view, which will eventually be seen in a theatre-type presentation with wings and a proscenium arch. The new frame height will be about 4.5” at mock-up scale.