A Little Slice of Rufford

Builder: James Harrison

 

This diorama is intended as a test piece for my planned layout “Rufford Red Lion Square”, with a setting of the Great Central Railway in Nottinghamshire between WWI and the Grouping. It lives in a box of dimensions 8” x 8” x 5” (though it would benefit from a shoehorn to get it in!) and depicts, as I imagine, a small corner of Rufford goods yard, featuring an end loading dock for road vehicles and a loading platform.

 

 

My budget was zero, almost everything came from my spares box and scrap. The base was built up from 3/8” thick balsa wood and edged with 1/32” balsa sheet. The track is DCC Concepts bullhead rail.

The fences, platform faces, timbering over the bufferstop- all these follow drawings prepared for the Great Central’s London Extension. I gained experience in following blueprints and scratchbuilding lineside details from this exercise, but I’m not sure I’d build fences from balsa strip again.

Figures are from Andrew Stadden’s range of Edwardian workers, the traction engine is a repainted Matchbox diecast toy and the crates and boxes were scratchbuilt. I used sawdust to suggest hay or straw on the platform- following a photograph of Marylebone goods depot.

A diary of building the diorama, with in-progress photographs, can be found on RMweb.