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Crowd Fascinated With T Gauge Layout
Ken G from sunny Queensland in Australia has kindly sent in this article to share:
After reading a recent blog posting and the article about John’s small layout that had too many trees etc I thought you might be interested in my T Gauge layout. T Gauge is 1:450 so its roughly half the size of Z and one third the size of N.
Although “T” stands for Three (3mm track) it could also stand for “Tiny”
Its called “Briefleigh” because it fits into a briefcase.
I work as a volunteer at the Workshops Rail Museum in Ipswich Qld and over the weekend of 26th and 27th October we held the Queensland Model Railway Show at the museum. After last year’s show I made a promise to myself that I would build a layout for this year’s show. It wasn’t really what I had originally intended but I built a T Gauge layout inside a briefcase and called it “Briefleigh”.
John’s story was a reminder of my thinking when I built the layout. I deliberately used trees and bushes sparingly so as not to dominate the scene and distract viewers from the overall appearance of the layout. I even used flocking quite sparingly. The base is made of extruded foam which was firstly painted with a flat brown acrylic. I then randomly air brushed the hills and areas outside of where the village was going to be with green and yellow/ochre. When the flocking was applied I left bare areas, again randomly, to depict a more earthy landscape.
The buildings, bridge supports and tunnel portals are all made from card. The larger industrial looking building is a model of enough of the museum for viewers at the show to recognise it as such. The whole museum would have almost filled the briefcase. The little layout generated an enormous amount of interest and comment, especially the eagle magically flying above the river, which unfortunately proves to be very difficult to photograph.
Robert adds – If you would like to submit an article for publication, please follow the “Submit Your Article” Link in the right hand column.
3 Responses to Crowd Fascinated With T Gauge Layout
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Ken G, your T-Gauge layout is fantastic and a real inspiration. I can see where I did wrong by trying to make small N-Scale layouts with too much scenery and trying to put too much is a small space. Your briefcase layout is a good example to model from and have a lot of fun with a small scale. The trouble is there isn’t much T-Gauge available where I live in the States, and Z-Scale is priced outrageously high. N is small enough anyway!
John
Hi Ken, your layout in the briefcase is a very good alternative for the layout I´m panning, and then there is definitely something. But a question: how big is your case? In my basement are suitcase how do you show. I´m living in Germany,
Hans
Sorry to be so slow with a reply Hans-Georg. The case is 45x33x16cm. I purchased it from an auto accessories shop. They sell it as a tool case, and some cosmetic suppliers sell it as a cosmetics case for about four times the price. It comes with six adjustable areas inside and my little layout just sits on top of the dividers. I store the rolling stock, the control/power box, tools and spares etc under the layout. I built it purely as a novelty. Being just a single loop of track its not really a layout, and its unlikely that I will be adding any more track.
Ken.