Out of order…

I have finished the last building, but not all the buildings on Beaverbrook. This summer the last structure in card was transformed into plastic - and then overtook the penultimate structure in the paint shop…

Beaverbrook has a series of distinctive and different warehouses and offices along its length. This smaller structure is currently painted cream. In the past it has been a pale grey. On the layout sort of a mix of the two… 

Constructed from layered styrene (40 thou core, Slaters embossed overlays glued with superglue) and detailed with offcuts and micro strip. Primed in grey the collection of disparate materials are unified, but too dark. You can see below, the first attempt at the background image selection to fill the gaps between structures, taken from Google Street View and adjusted, faded and de-saturated.

Some initial painting saw Humbrol 28 and one of my last tins of 72 used to give a base finish. This looked ok, but a little dark - so a waft or two of white primer unified the finish, softened the edges and lightened the colour (below and top). 

The roller shutter and door on the right are cropped from a Streetview image and the windows are dark grey frames applied to clear scrap packaging material using my Grandma’s bow pen (she worked for Simon Calves after the war as a copier, making copies by hand of engineering drawings).

The combination of materials, methods and textures sounds like a right mess, but careful consideration of composition, colour and deliberately neat messy features all work to stitch the parts into a believable whole. Each selected almost instinctively, there was no drawing or grand plan to follow. Dimensioned by eye, crafted in that mindful headspace where the hands carry out the task without much conscious thinking… it is, therefore a complete success.

A layout is never really ‘finished’, and this is still far from complete. Beaverbrook still provides sanctuary from a busy day, an enjoyable distraction switching cars and imagining rail-fanning with my friend Chris. It is a deliberate difference from ‘the day job’ and all the better for it. This autumn should see the penultimate building painted and the structures along the back then ‘finished’ for now - allowing me to move on to the next project, street lights and more detailing along the road. For now though, I see a HMLX stencilled switcher idling alongside the office building and I’m lost once more, finding myself trackside in New Brunswick, hundreds of miles from the pressures and demands of the real world. Until next time, more soon…

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