New T Gauge Technical Details and FAQ pages on the blog.

I have added 2 new pages to the blog with information taken from the defunct T-Gauge.net website. The Technical details and FAQ pages have links to them under the main title at the top of this page.

Also, here is a pic of the cake my Mother made for my birthday. Look familiar?

Adding a backscene has made a big difference

I decided I didn't like the black background of the guitar case and decided the best way to fix this was with a backscene. Normally I'm quite dismissive of the concept because its very easy to have a background that doesn't fit very well. Either because of different colours, features not lining up, wrong style or just generally not feeling right. So I was a bit wary that I was going to make the layout look worse.

To my knowledge you can't buy printed backscenes in T scale. So my plan was to find a free one on the internet and scale it down until it looked right and print it off myself. My initial backscene sort of looked ok but it just didn't feel right. It had a river and a city centre with lots of buildings. So I went searching again and found another and printed that. I am very pleased with the outcome. It has greenery in the perfect spots for where my hills begin either side, its not distracting and the buildings fit very well with with my buildings directly in front of it. The only downside is there is a gravestone on the foreground which looks enormous to scale, so I'll have to hide it with trees or something. Either was I'm very happy with the result, it lightens the layout up nicely and gives a sense of depth.

The layout has had its first outing to an exhibition! The Silverfox DCC club exhibition in Milton Keynes

It was a bit of a last minute thing but I volunteered to take my guitar case to the exhibition about 2 weeks before it was due to happen and they managed to squeeze me in. So on the 16th of August I arrived for my first exhibition that I have exhibited at since I was about 17 (quite a few years ago). I was overwhelmed with the response. It was very popular. After working on it so long and being used to the tinyness its easy to forget how unusual it is. Because of the response, I have been reinvigorated to work on it further and I have plans for things to improve it (and I want more stock to run on it now lol).

The layout is now called Stratfield - and here's a video of it

The name Stratfield is a mixture of Strat (the guitar name) and Cranfield (a village where I grew up).

The Layout is effectively FINISHED!!!!! Hurray!!

I've glued the final flock, trees and random fluff and the layout is now effectively finished! It took nearly a year (which was 99% procrastination on the project). I have learnt much about working with such small models. The idea seemed so easy in the beginning, it turned out to be a bit more of an effort. Mostly due to frustration with dealing with such small stuff, there's a sheep somewhere on my floor that I'll never find.

While I say its effectively finished, I do intend to carry on with small bits and bobs, like adding more cars and people and other finishing touches.

Without further ado, the interesting bit of the blog post, the pics:

List of T Gauge suppliers

I've made a page on the blog that lists the T Gauge suppliers I've found. There's a new bar at the top of the page with a link to the new Useful T Gauge Info page.

Fences and horses