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While looking through the railway modelling press my eye was drawn repeatedly to the parish church model from Metcalfes of Skipton. I made the model however before I started to document the layout so unfortunately there are no photos of construction. I will however endeavour to record the various stages of placement into the layout. I began by building a small hill for the church to sit on using 2 cigar boxes and building plaster cloth round it, sorry no photo of this stage but it can clearly be seen in this photo.
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I had to drill the baseboard and a cigar box to accommodate the lighting wires. Once the hill was dry I glued the church down using normal PVA glue. A trip to Antics yielded some head stones which were also glued down. As this is to be a well tended churchyard a light green under colour was applied to the plaster cloth ready to take the woodland scenics “fine turf”. After looking at real church yards I decided that a low wall would be a nice boundary. I did not however like the ready made walls on offer so began to ponder on the different ways walls could be cheaply and easily made. I had a look through the box of waste bits I keep and found some sheets of walling left over from the Metcalfes Viaduct (another model made before my camera borrowing.) and the off cuts of the retaining wall. I carefully cut one course of the retaining wall for the church wall top stones and the depth was ideal for the height of the wall. Two strips of the Metcalfe walling were then glued to each side of the top stones to create a quite realistic low boundary wall.
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Each part of the wall was then glued down to completely enclose the churchyard
I “laid” the grass in stages as the weather was hot and the PVA glue dried quickly. For the churchyard turf I used Noch static grass. This is the first time I have used it and found the process simple and efficient with the aid of a puffer bottle
My next decision was the church path, do I lay sets or a cinder path. The cinder path won for the simple reason that if I did not like it I could always change it to sets or paving stones later. The problem of the path from the lynch gate to the road however was easily overcome by cutting a strip of slaters plasticard sets and gluing it down. The join between the field and the path was disguised by placing Woodland scenics clump bushes.(the white patches are only glue splodges which will dry clear
To bring a bit of life to the scene a set of Noch wedding figures were added. (nearly bought the funeral scene!)
The final photo while being dull clearly shows the interior lighting.
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