Monday, May 14, 2012

Slim Gauge Circle 2012

Steampunk railwayI should be working hard on some garden railway stuff for a mag, or painting a miniature cruise liner. Instead, I took a break for a couple of hours to head over to Rugby, for a day the centre of the universe as far as narrow gauge American railways are concerned.

The most startling model was some steampunk model making. How about a chunk of asteroid with a space ship, literally a ship for space, moored to it. In the middle is a little mine railway...

For those who want to know, the ship comes from Industria Mechanika and is called the Remora. For $150, you'd better want it pretty badly, although compared to some locomotive kits, it's not bad.

More conventionally, there was a rather nice bogie hopper wagon from Grandt Line that appeared on the more complete of the two layouts on show. The other layout was very much under construction as we wandered around. This one was pretty complete but most of the locos were unpainted brass - presumably from Korea with prices that deter you from unpacking the airbrush. Mind you, they looked beautiful and ran like a dream.

Steel hopper


The buildings were laser cut wooden kits which I'd previously only seen in magazine adverts.

Wooden Station

Wooden Shed


It's a funny event - half the room was random people selling off their old bits and pieces, a sort of specialist jumble sale. Great fun as you never know quite what you will find. I managed to resist projects but did come away with a superb book on building model bridges. An American publication that I'd never seen before and possibly is the only copy this side of the Atlantic.



(Photo Note: All these pictures were taken on my mobile phone. I've been trying to persuade Chris Nevard that he can ditch his DSLR for one and I think I've proved my point.)





1 comment:

Iain Robinson said...

They are fab photos. As I always maintain, it's the person behind the lens that counts more than anything...! I do like that mine layout, pity there aren't slate asteroids flying around in space!