Another layout that's got me thinking!

Whilst on a visit to a local model shop at the weekend I picked up a copy of the April 2008 Continental Modeller which i obviously missed first time around. In it there's an article on a French layout named Pempoul (metre gauge in 1:50 scale) built by Gordon and Maggie Gravett. The scenery on Pempoul is fantastic, i had seen pictures before, and when i saw the article that explained some of the Gravett's methods i had to buy it!

Some pics of Pempoul on these sites:
Crawley MRS
World Rail Fans
RMweb

I've just noticed it's going to be at ExpoNG (Swanley) later this year so will be able to take it all in then!

Two things in particular stand out for me, firstly the grass. This is done using a Noch Grasmaster which electrostatically charges the flock powder so that it stands on end when dropped into some adhesive on the layout, the difference between this and the old puffer bottle for flock is quite noticable. This looks particularly good for representing fine grass, but i think for the more moorland areas i'll stick to longer carpet underlay to achieve the more rough look.

The only thing putting me off getting a Grasmaster for PnC is the £100+ price tag... some experimenting with a balloon and something to rub it on before i go down the Noch path i think!

The other thing that struck me about Pempoul was the colouring and the fact that it's so subdued. Layouts with bright colours on stick out like a sore thumb, both vegetation, buildings and other scenic items need to appear more subtly coloured. After all they are being viewed at well over several hundred scale feet away most of the time so they should appear in model form as they do in real life over this sort of distance, not how they do when viewed up close.

Upon realising this i looked back through my modelling books and found a useful introduction to colour in Dave Frary's How to Build Realistic Model Railroad Scenery. However i feel that this is an area that military modellers generally achieve much better results than railway modellers, so i will be looking at this source for more information.

Pempoul has also made me think about baseboard construction, it's boards are 4 and 9mm ply around an extruded polystyrene core. Extruded polystyrene is not the white polysytrene used typically for packaging in the UK, but the coloure foam you can get for housing insulation (amongst other thigs). An example of it in use on a layout is this shot of the latest section of County Gate under construction by John de Fraysinnet.

Whether this approach will be lighter than the initial thought of ply and foamboard formers i'm not sure, but i believe it will be infinitely stronger due to it's more solid construction. The only area i can see being an issue is mounting the point motors, this could be done by having cross braces etc. where these are needed and mounting them on these. American modellers use this material much more than us in the UK, i'll try and find some info on mounting point motors from some US sites.

Hopefully i can find out more about the construction of Pempoul's boards at Swanley.

And a brief update on the Roco... it's been run in for about 5 hours now, and it will run soooo smoothly and will crawl round my circular test track even when controlled by my old H&M clipper, so it will be 10 times better when hooked up to DCC!