Garden Railway Forum

One of the ideas I always had for my trainset is that, as its completely flat, the scenery would be more urban than countryside. In particular, some of the buildings would be much bigger than the trains. Over the years successive buildings have got bigger - well they seem big when you put them on the dining room table - then shrunk in the great outdoors. Today a mate came round to help install a lift tower and a walkway at Cottam Stadt, and finally I got a structure which looks bigger than the trains.

Anyone else tried to make big buidlings? I'm going to overhaul some of my other structures so I'll add some piccies as I go.

I have to agree with you that some of the buildings do seem to shrink when they go outside!! Yes, I always have that feeling that our buildings are not big enough when compared with the locos. Certainly as an ex-dolls house owner, who even as a young child I was obsessed with things being in scale, I am very aware of this mix up of scales and sizes. Because we invested in some British Outline Buildings for the station everything else I have made from scratch comes up big. I first station building was scratch built and to be honest we scaled it down from real life to us it looked fine but to other buildings we purchased it looked huge. So, stick to your own big buildings it looks great in the pics and don't lose you way!

On the building's front I decided a while back that I would accept some loss of detail in favour of them being (a) weatherproof, and (b) the right size, which for me is 15mm:foot.  However, I have not got very far with an buildings yet as I am still laying track a year and a half on thanks to some engineering challenges (also called hills) in the way. The middle section of my line is on a continuous gradient whch I have to try and restrict to 1 in 36. Finding a route to do that has been difficult to say the least. Now that I finally have a quiet week, it has bloody well snowed - aarrgghh!

When I finally do get around to it a couple of my buildings will be quite big. A carriage shed to take three bogie coaches will have to be 5' long, and a 50' by 20' station building is not going to be small in 15mm either, but I bet they will both shrink once I get them outside!

Peter in AZ