Building a one day layout

[MeTheSwede]

 

Lately my model railway hobbying has been paused as I've focused on other World War II related things.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now how did that Japanese steamer and roling stock end up in Normandy? I know there was German-Japanese trade over the Transiberian Railway before the German invasion of Russia, but changing the gauge for the axels at the border crossings must have been cumbersome. 😅

 

 

So what I've been doing lately is building wargaming terrain for the game Crossfire. I picked 10mm (i.e. N-scale) to work in, thinking there could be advantages in using the same scale I already have model railway things for. Strangely enough it didn't really occur to me until this week that driving trains on the wargaming table might be fun. I've got quite a lot of leftover track, so I decided to paint it and build a loop. I even have an extra train controller, so only had to borrow some rolling stock from Yamahama.

 

 

Colour footage is coming soon!

 

 

[Beaver]

If you want to combine the hobbies some more, how about a Taiwan setting? Japanese forces defend the west coast main line to keep supplies moving to their defence installations while American commandos and air forces try to stop the trains so as to weaken the defences before their landing ships can approach.

[MeTheSwede]

I have considered doing hypotetical stuff set in Operation Downfall (the planed allied invasion of Japan). Maybe I will go that route at some point.

[MeTheSwede]

And as promised in colour:

 

 

 

 

This is the steam locomotive D51 200 by Kato pulling various Kato and Tomix cars.

 

 

Some areas were far from the track or other activities. The gravel roads are loose ballast.

 

 

The "water effect" is as simple as some transparent plastic files for paper storage.

 

 

The wheatfields are pieces of an IKEA doormat.

I wish they had a mat for rice paddys too.

 

 

Some tomytec cows.

 

 

A rare occasion of my cats and trains being in the same room.

 

 

An aerial view reveals track continuing outside of the scenery and me being short on points.

 

 

And this is why I named the thread "Building a one day layout". It's all getting packed away and another day it will be put together to form a different train layout or wargaming table . Maybe this could inspire someone into making their own non-permanent layout.

 

 

[cteno4]

Kudos, excellent work Swede! So much can be done simply like this without having to go to the full blown permanent layout.

 

one of the other forum members from a long time ago did this nice article on using wargaming temporary setups as an approach to model railroads. He did a lot of what you did and with structures just created a mat a bit bigger than the structure to sort of create a ring of glued down scenery detail around them this really made the structures pop and helped the eye to ignore more temporary stuff nicely. He also created some little scenery islands with detailed scenery bits glued down to a small block or mat.

 

https://www.japanrailmodelers.org/pages/modelingjapan/tempoary.html

 

cheers,

 

jeff

[Madsing]

Really impressive! For some reason I really like to black and white photos, and some of them really look like old postcards that you would have scanned!

[Aleks]

Great idea and great work! Trains played a very significant role in both WWI and WWII. I doubt it's easy to find models if they even exist but there were plenty armored trains that could even go into battle where practical.

[Rod.H]

On 7/30/2023 at 9:01 AM, Aleks said:

Great idea and great work! Trains played a very significant role in both WWI and WWII. I doubt it's easy to find models if they even exist but there were plenty armored trains that could even go into battle where practical.

Most of the armoured trains I know of are non-running 1/35 plastic kits or 1/100 resin blobs

[Cat]

7 hours ago, Rod.H said:

Most of the armoured trains I know of are non-running 1/35 plastic kits or 1/100 resin blobs

ArtMaster and Wespe among others make a number of nice offerings in HO scale.