This week on the Great Model Railway Challenge, the Missenden Modellers, Porthcawl Model Railway Club and Strangers on a Model Train built some amazing layouts based on movies.
Behind the Scenes Photos
Final Pictures
What did I learn?
More toys and gadgets caught my eye and I bought a Cordless Bosch Glue Pen for hot glue (https://amzn.to/2LNkfg6). I don’t generally use hot glue but this had more control and is great for foam.
Another key feature of the week was using forced perspective backdrops. They look amazing and don’t need to take a huge amount of space. I’m thinking about how to incorporate them on my next layout.
If you want to find out more then check out the following book: Creating a Backscene with Paul Bambrick & John Ellis-Cockell. https://amzn.to/2PROXs1
[Edited – a few people got in touch saying they were surprised I hadn’t heard of forced perspectives. I didn’t make myself clear enough did I!
I love forced perspective and one of my favourite layouts is an essay in forced perspective – BA Bodil:

Also that year at Warley (2013) was this forced perspective layout:



It’s fascinating how perspective works and how nothing can be exactly square for it to work successfully.
I’m also planning to use an N-scale barn on my layout to show the depth progression – it’s been half painted for several years!
What I hadn’t seen before that Missenden did was a 3 foot deep urban forced perspective scene starting with a printed backdrop in several layers of cutouts, lit with LEDs. In front of that was 5 rows of terraced houses starting from a relatively small scale all the way up to 100% scale. These were also lit. It was a tour de force and no matter what people are saying online about Missenden, this was truly gifted modelling by Andrew And Barry, its creators.
So there we go, forced perspective done very differently to most other layouts around!]
The Amazon links are all items I have either bought or bought something similar for myself. Clicking on any links to Amazon will give me a small affiliate income which I use to produce more videos. Every little helps!
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