My Model Train

Dreams do come true ♥

As a child I always wished for a train set, I wasn’t really into dolls and such. Motorbikes, sailing and flying model aeroplanes were much more my style… and trains take up a lot of space so it just didn’t happen… even after giving birth to 2 boys – I really thought I’d struck gold there – well I did – but not in the sense of trains, no mater how hard I encouraged them to take an interest in the hobby 😦

Fast forward to the age of 47 and yes you guessed it I GOT A TRAIN SET!!!

After 30 years of hinting my darling husband gave up his pool table and his credit card and we went shopping…

Now as a crafty person my main focus of this train set of course had to be the layout and every thing that goes with it and so many of my friends make incredible miniatures that I just had to start too (or at least I knew they could save me when I got stuck)

But before the fun can begin the planning must be done…

The first step was where to put the basics… the blanket in the photo above is a mountain 😉 the lighthouse (top right corner) just had to go next to the fish tank and so on…

The track was then laid down in its final position and we (hubby) drew the placement onto the board…

The track was removed and the cork underlay was glued down and then the track was nailed down onto the cork and finally the real fun began…

Building a tunnel and a mountain…

I added the ballast to the tracks and we cut up a plastic bottle, painted it blacked, pinned it to the board and added black paper to the open sections and voilà ! we have a tunnel…

Then we made hundreds of “pillows” (better than balls according to the experts) of newspaper and secured them with masking tape and added many, many, many… you get the idea… layers of toilet paper/paper towels and watered down PVA to form a “mountain”  full disclosure – at this point I was seriously doubting all of my artistic skills…

While waiting for all the layers of glue to dry I tried my hand at making a miniature skip out of cardboard (a free printable online somewhere) which I dirtied up and placed strategically near the workers in the hopes of keeping this building site tidy…

Back to the mountain…

 A variety of earthy coloured paints splotched all over helped regain a little of my confidence but the real transformation happened when I added the foliage…

PVA glue base coat, scatterings of 2 brown ground covers, 3 green grasses and 2 green fine bushes and then sprayed with watered down PVA glue to set it 🙂

The final touch for this round was a tunnel face which I made out of fun foam, I drew the blocks on with black ball point pen (pressing hard to get the indentations) and then coloured lightly with grey acrylic paint – I made sides too but decided not to use them…

A few random bushes and dripping vines and phase one of the mountain is complete –  doing a happy dance 🙂

Now this empty patch of brown needs to turn into a farm – wish me luck xxx