Commission: European secondary...
There has been a real flurry of layout design commissions of late here in the workshop, the variety of which never ceases to amaze me…
This time we’re looking at a scheme based in Europe, location agnostic, but inspired by a real location in Poland. Sometimes a story is told through a fixed place, a memory, other times it can be just a feeling.
In this instance it was a blend of memories exploring industrial railways with a parent combined with that familiar love of model railways. A desire to have something to ‘play trains’ with yet in a realistic setting. My typical cameo layout in H0 scale isn’t large, so keeping the full story off stage means we have a place where different trains with different locomotives hauling different loads can rub shoulders without incongruent details of factory or works.
The prototype location saw railways on several layers with evolution and rationalisation through time. A gentle nod to this in a re-organisation of some elements to suit our scheme. Putting the junction with rationalised trackwork between railway bridges, themselves a contrast - one a modern electric expressway the other an aging freight only system. These have their front exits hidden by the wings, and as it is viewed closed to eye level their exits are lost behind other detail.
The blend between industrial and rationalised traffic is front and centre, an industrial pipe runs through the scene, so typical of the area. Is it a heating pipe or something more industrial? A pair of aging huts break up the view along the front edge and trees line the embankment.
My layout design process isn’t just restricted to cameo schemes, I can work with you to design a layout in any scale, gauge, prototype. Working together we explore your ideas, memories and inspiration as much as we explore your constraints and the more tangible traditional elements of layout design. If you’d like to work with me then get in touch (the contact form is in the menu or you can look on the commissions tab for other methods), the process starts from just £175. Until next time, more soon…
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Greetings from Czechia.
ReplyDelete"...an industrial pipe runs through the scene, so typical of the area."
Well put.
"Is it a heating pipe or something more industrial?"
A very relevant question, indeed. In the relevant countries (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, eastern part of Germany, former USSR countries) I would bet it is a heating pipe leading from an adjacent coal fired power plant to a neighbouring city. Very often such pipelines are 20 or more km long.The longer they are the larger the pipe diameter must be; then very often you can see not only one pipeline (in fact two lines hidden in a common thermal insulation jacket, one leading steam to the place of consumption and the other one returning condensate to the plant) but two parallel pipelines insulated separately.
E. g. the pipeline from Mělník power plant to Prague is a pair of separately insulated pipes long 34 km, diameter of each being 1,2 m. In the Czech landscape it looks like this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:M%C4%9Bln%C3%ADk%E2%80%93Praha_heating_pipeline. And if you want to compare your image with a real pipeline parallely led along a Czech railway line, try this video: https://www.idnes.cz/cestovani/po-cesku/na-co-zira-masinfira-trat-045-trutnov-svoboda-nad-upou-krkonose.A211124_105641_po-cesku_vrja/foto/V211123_152006_idnestv_vrja, footage 06:42 to 07:57.
Hank - thank you for stopping by and taking time to help me out here! Sounds like I was on the right track!
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