Modellings tips and answers - Inspiration - Modelling the High Street - Videos

Jeff Arnold sent us some pictures of his Isle of Wight Brading station in OO gauge. He added "please see attached progress, all card, kits, papers, glues, paints and plasticard etc purchased from your Upstairs Downstairs. Next stage is ballasting the track and adding the scenery." Click on the images to see them in full size and access a few more pictures.

This week in history

On the 1st of October 1906, the Karawanks railway tunnel opened. The tunnel is 26,168ft long (just under five miles) and links Austria and Slovenia. It was built to facilitate a link between the port of Trieste with Klagenfurt and is the fourth longest railway tunnel in Austria.

Although not many of us are modelling a candlestick makers, we do often turn to the more traditional butchers and bakers to populate the high streets of our railway layouts. Along with a local pub, the inclusion of these businesses is almost obligatory, and rightly so as they are also present in many small towns and villages, or at least they used to be in fondly remembered times gone by. But what if you want a longer high street? what other types of shops could you model?

There are several different styles and types of shops you can consider to shake up your high street, give it some character, and even modernise it if you wish, especially in OO gauge plastic kit form. Vollmer's Lidl supermarket is a prime example of the evolution of a real high street in model form. It is large enough to represent the store whilst being small enough to fit into a reasonably sized diorama. If space is an issue, an interesting option is to install some railway arches shops. The example by Wills Kits can be incorporated into a real viaduct with moderate skill or used as part of a back-scene to add a metropolitan feel to your station approach.

For smaller or older towns and villages, Vollmer's repair shop indeed makes a convincing local garage, but choose not to include the signage, and the building has a multitude of uses from a florist to a farm shop. If you are prepared to print your own signage, Dapol's 'shop with flats above' makes an ideal newsagent, chip shop or take away and markets can be easily produced using stalls and kiosks from a multitude of manufacturers. Whatever the size, era or theme of your high street or town, there are plenty of models you can use to make it, extend it and give it an identity.

Another way you can escape modelling tradition on your high street, is with the use of figures to give purpose to generic or existing shops. This is not a new concept and Langley Models has been producing white metal cameo sets for quite a while, including scenes that depict a fishmonger, a saddlers shop, a hardware store, a motorcycle repair shop and a blacksmith. Modern scenes tend to be modelled more from plastic, but there's a huge selection of them to choose from in white metal, the 'fashion store figures' being just one.

Of the many problems that modellers face to make their layouts unique, modelling an interesting and varied High Street is certainly not one of them!

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