This week on the Great Model Railway Challenge, the Aberdeen Model Railway Club, The Shunter Guys and Wakefield Model Railway Club had the joy of creating a waterworld themed layout. Creating water scenery is a challenge that many modellers shy away from because it can be messy and use products like resin. These teams had to wow us with their water whilst still building an amazing layout in 24 hours.
Behind the Scenes Photos
Final Pictures
What did I learn?
I discovered some cool new tools and items for electrics this week from Mike from Aberdeen. He works on oil rigs and had so many cool toys! First up were bootlace crimps which keep your wiring tidy and are easier than my normal method of soldering. I also discovered helacons which are posh terminal blocks but are quick to use and look cool too!
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!
A selection of Helacons: https://amzn.to/2IJjh4Y
Bootlace crimps: https://amzn.to/2NpHnCu
Not surprisingly, I learnt that time and resin don’t mix. If you absolutely need to do resin in a hurry then Woodland Scenics deep pour resin set overnight but was much hotter as it set than other brands. That would be a worry on plastic models but the seagulls seemed to cope with the depth used by Aberdeen. Check out this video by Luke Towan if you want to see what could go wrong.
I made a few dioramas the weekend before to show a step by step on how to model water but they chose to use a few of my other dioramas to talk about modelling water instead. It was actually great fun to do some modelling in a weekend but like the show, it was really pushing the time to get them finished. You can see that video here: Great Model Railway Challenge Water Diorama
The three key points for me when modelling water are:
- location – water should sit in a landscape
- movement – it makes all the difference
- details, details, details
This is the finished diorama I did in two days.
These are some photos of the other dioramas of mine that they may show on the programme.
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What a shame your water diorama’s had less than a split second of air time in the show that was broadcast . I agree with the result and Aberdeen were worthy winners and had trains that ran .
John
I had 3-4 dioramas for a few seconds each. Not much but I was happy to see them up there.
Kathy