Forecourt Fancies- and more stuff from the lost folder!

About three times life-size. Now I can see lots of places I need to file and smooth!

 I've almost completed the garage project. But when I went to add the three pumps, from an old Gem whitemetal kit, I found that they were more suited to 3mm scale than 4mm. After a bit of headscratching, I decided to carve them out of styrene. You can see from the comparison just how out of scale the pumps were - I found a photograph of the Avery Hardoll pump with someone standing next to it-and these things are taller than I thought. The globes are slightly too big- compared to the GEM one, which is way too small, it looks rather too well-nourished, but when offered up to the forecourt, all looks believable. At least to someone with my tenuous grip on reality anyway.

Carving the globe from styrene.

 They need a coat of paint now, and the application of decals. I can't begin to tell you what a fiddle the pipes were. I should have made them out of cored solder, which bends easily; but I didn't have any. So I ended up making the pipes from brass wire. Not recommended!

As promised, I have posted a couple of old drawings from the pages of the Railway Modeller mag of 1980, and one from the ill-fated "Scale Trains" magazine, from '82, I think.

The photo is of a western-inspired model for a customer's layout, again from the time capsule folder. This was made almost exclusively from wood veneer and is to HO scale, inspired by a model I'd seen in "Model Railroad Craftsman" magazine. It was by E.L. Moore, an elderly modeller who made amazing structures from a tiny and very cluttered corner of his home. Thanks to J D Lowe on his blog here for reminding me of this gentleman. I think the original was called "The 8 Ball Loco Works".

Not long to go now and I'll be able to post the completed garage photos, but I'll need to clean up all those snipped off bits of brass wire!

The drawing from "Darvill's Yard"