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Ronnie Hillen sent us this picture of the model F1 track he built during lockdown for his grandson Lucas. Or was it for himself?

This week in history - After escaping amalgamation with the Big four and British Railways the Ffestiniog Railway eventually ceased operations due to an ongoing decline in passengers and freight in the late 1940s. However, after much hard work on the 23rd of July 1955 the Ffestiniog reopened as a preserved railway and has been chugging away ever since.

Embossed cardboard sheets are large sections of card with realistic portrayals of various building materials printed on them, they are often used by scratch builders to create retaining walls, tunnel portals, platform edges, buildings and just about anything else you can think of that in real life is made from brick, stone, cobbles, tiles or slate.

They are made from strong card and embossed to create a 3D effect, they can be easily cut and shaped to make intricate shapes or layered to give depth to a feature.

Due to their excellent value compared to their plastic equivalent or ready to place models, card sheets have also gained popularity with modellers that have large expanses to cover such as lengthy retaining walls.

They are easy to use and offer a wide variety of styles and building materials. While you can see the whole OO range here, here are a few examples from Noch in 00 gauge including weathered, red brick, Industrial walling with graffiti, irregular pavement, limestone wall and clinker varieties.

And not forgetting N gauge, of which you can see the full range here, here are some options including modern pavement, clinker and quarrystone walling.

 
Moving away from recreations of man-made structures to ones fashioned by mother nature, there are many ways to create boulders and rock faces including, using traditional papier-mache covering a wire-frame, carving some expanding-foam or foam-bricks and covering a cardboard skeleton with plaster cloth, all of these methods provide brilliant effects when done correctly.

However, there's a way to create equally impressive rock faces that involves little more than scrunching up a piece of paper to create them.

Wrinkle Rocks are a variation of textured walling sheets, but, instead of bricks or stones, the sheets portray rugged, natural rock formations.

Strangely the sheets come out of the packet smooth and flat, not a very convincing rock face you may say, but here's where the innovation kicks in!

By simply scrunching the sheets up you can create a texture that perfectly mirrors the angles and appearance of a natural rock formation, the more you scrunch, the better the effect, this leaves you with a very convincing rock face that takes mere seconds to create.  

The sheets come in 45cm by 22.5cm sections and are specially formulated so that the laminated print will not deteriorate, crack or split in any way during the scrunching process no matter how much punishment you give them. Fixing the sheets to the layout is done using a quality PVA adhesive so as well as being quick, the sheets are easy to use too.

There are many designs to choose from including:

• Grossvendiger, this sheet has a grey rock face in appearance with a subtle sandy effect
• Sandstone, with a beautiful copper colour seeping through bringing the design to life and looks amazing
• Seiser Alm, for damper locations with hints of vegetation beginning to take hold in the crags
• Wildspitze and Grosslockner designs for fine or coarse rock formations

Noch has evidently put a lot of thought into not only making their product easy to use but also into its appearance and finished effect.

 

 

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