Modellings tips and answers - adding big and small monuments to your layout

David Lye sent us a picture of the grounded van he built from a Ratio kit. This proves once again that adding a few figures give the whole scene an atmosphere. Click on the picture to see it in larger size.

This week in history

On March 28th 1955, a French SNCF Class CC 7100 electric locomotive broke a world record (and the track) when it achieved a staggering top speed of 331 km/h (206mph).

Most layouts feature a little bit of the world outside the railway's perimeters, often this comes in the form of a high street serving as a continuation of a station scene. Left unchecked though, and it's all too easy for your high street to become a caricature of the real thing. A good way to help avoid this is to add some ornamental features such as a monument, floral display, statue or a memorial to distinguish it and give it a characterful identity. This is especially easy to achieve in 00 gauge with many models of this type available including flower beds, village crosses, war memorials, benches, and statues.

If space is limited and you haven't enough room for a new structure, you may want to consider adding additional features to your existing high street such as a billboard, some crates, a bicycle stand, pillar boxes, phone boxes or a pedestrian crossing. Items like these give you further opportunities to think of lots of cameo scenes using figures or vehicles to bring your scene to life.

Modelling tips

We keep on adding modelling tips to our website. Here are the latest ones:

You can also access all the articles by visiting this page or simply click the link called "tips" on our website.

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