C'mon you 'Ull

Sorry, nothing to do with model trains but this is special.  With Hull City Tigers being promoted to the Premier League for a second time, it is time to celebrate.

C'mon You 'Ull.........

More Background Scenery Ideas

Having returned from a trip to England a couple of months ago, I was looking through our holiday photos and found some which would adapt themselves to ideas for painting background scenery.  I think the hardest part of painting backgrounds is to get the colours right - I imagine that it is difficult to get the colours subtle enough so that they stay in the background where they belong.

I love this photo because of the houses clustered around the bottom of the hill at Whitby and the ruined abbey at the top.  Note the difference between the houses in the foreground and the ones in the background which are much smaller.

This on is spot-on for colour.  Welsh hills taken from Anglesey.  The hills have three shades of blue with the sky being another two shades of blue with the white clouds.

Fields and hills in Wales showing the bright green foliage in the foreground fading away to almost grey in the background.

 Here is another photo which my nephew took whilst walking in the Cotswalds. Love the shadow of the clouds in this one.

Storage Options under the Tables

While Eddie was in hospital getting his pain management sorted, I bought him two flat-pack storage cubes which are perfect for holding the magazine holders.  There was room for two of them under the long baseboard which runs along the 3m wall and they were the first two things that he made up once he was home again and feeling better.  We already had the cheap pine shelving unit which fitted snugly along the shorter 2.4 metre wall.  Later on I'll make him a curtain to go along the front of the layout to hide all the bits and pieces and maybe another curtain to go along the front of the back section.

Starting Again with 00 Guage

All of his life Eddie has wanted a model train lay-out but it was always something that he was 'gunna' do one day.  Well now that he has found out that he has both Prostate and Bone cancer, that day has arrived.  Fortunately, one of our sons is also interested in model railways and being a tradie (albeit electrician rather than a carpenter) he decided that with Dad in hospital, he would take it into his own hands and build the base-boards to kick start things.  As he has a fly-in, fly-out job on a minesite, he could only work on the lay-out on one day each week that he is home.

Week one, Adam spent eight hours building the framework and putting the tops onto them.  They sat on the floor of our front room for two weeks before he could return and build the supports and legs.  He made the lay-out high enough for Eddie (6 ft 3ins tall) and Adam (6ft 1ins tall) to get under and work on and then bolted the tables to the wall.  Having the baseboards in place gave us the idea of the size of it so I brought Eddie home from hospital for a few hours to inspect it.  Naturally he is delighted and is now looking forward to getting on with it.

He is making every inch of space under the framework available for storage.  I bought him two flat-pack storage cubes from Bunnings which he put together and they fit nicely under two sections of the framework - great for those magazine holders full of model railway and steam railway magazines.

Two weeks later:  Eddie is home from hospital and feeling heaps better thanks to medication and chemotherapy.  One of his mates from the W.A. Model Railway Club got him seven sheets of 3mm cork from a flooring supplier for only $6.50 per sheet which he is now gluing to the baseboard with full strength PVA glue ($17.60 for a 4 lt bottle at Bunnings). When we realised that it wouldn't be enough to cover all of the table top, I went back and bought five more sheets. Once that is done, he will trim the cork back to the edges of the baseboards and he will be ready to lay the tracks.

So, this is where we are up to so far.......

The baseboards against the wall. The whole thing measures 3m (10ft)  x 2.4m (8ft)  with a 3 square metre operating well in the centre.  The pieces of 0 guage baseboards are now in the garage and will be built along one wall at a later date.

And This was our front Lounge room?

The model railway club wanted to get rid of the end of their 0 gauge exhibition lay-out to make room for a new section.......so we now have it in what used to be our front lounge room. It won't stay there though because that is where the 00 layout is going to live. Now Eddie has to design some sort of built in area under the back patio to keep the weather out before we can install this lay-out (albeit changed from the end of the clubs lay-out to a north-eastern Yorkshire sea-side terminus lay-out. This is my pay-back for having a sewing studio built in the back garden a few years ago........

Eddie wins First Prize

Eddie entered a competition to build a kit building which he received from the W.A. branch of AMRA. He put a lot of time and effort in building his pair of semi-detached houses, garages, yards and gardens complete with a vegie patch but never in a million years thought that he would win a prize. When we visited the club-rooms to view all the buildings on display, his had won the "00" gauge prize because he had thought to add rolled paper guttering and downpipes to the houses. The kit was good but did not include guttering or downpipes so he made them and painted them black and they really did look great. Congratulations Eddie, you did a super job and the prize was well deserved.

Here are the houes from the front, back and above, looking down on the back yards. These will no doubt go onto his 00 gauge layout once it is finished. Other people have a front lounge room - we have a front model railway layout room!!

Background Scenery Ideas

These backdrops were removed from the O Gauge layout which Eddie bought from the WA Model Railway Club. So that I have some ideas for painting new backboards for the lay-out once it is installed in Ed's railway modelling room, I took these photos to give me some inspiration.