St Sidwell's Avenue
To be clear...this is not a model of, or even a representation of, the real St Sidwell's avenue in Exeter. It's more of a freelance idea located approximately where St Sidwell's avenue would be on the layout. The original baseboard was plain grass and after it's rebuilding I decided to avoid the plain look and incorporated a flat area with the eventual aim of placing some buildings to add interest.
I then used a downloaded texture of a road surface, from www.textures.com to print the roads on plain A4 and stick them down.
Left is a piece of grey painted 4mm plywood, located into a recess set into the top of the embankment on board 9. The plywood is removable so I can glue the buildings down and work on them, off the layout.
I wanted to curve the backscene and avoid the 90deg corner so I built a rough MDF shape and screwed and glued it to the left hand back board (below). The rest of the curved corner was built up in card so it could be 'flared' into the flat back boards.
A piece of card was then glued to the corner supports, the edges filled and smoothed into the back board and the whole lot covered with a sky paper from ID backscenes
After some cogitation about how to make buildings for the corner, I decided to scan and print a Metcalf model to the right size and see if it was any easier than scratch building. It would save me the trouble of deciding on a design and working out how to construct it...must be easier....mustn't it?
'N' gauge Kits for the front and rear of the houses were purchased and each sheet was scanned and printed out on my A3 colour printer at 142%
The cut lines were pricked through onto thin card to mark what needed removing. After cutting out the print was glued onto thin card with glue stick
The window acetates were placed on black card and scanned before being printed out onto A4 self adhesive labels. The labels were stuck to 0.5mm clear plastic and the frames and bars carefully cut round and the centres removed to leave a fully glazed frame. Some were coloured with a pencil for variety.
The walls were thickened up with card and the windows and doors fitted before the walls were assembled generally as per the instructions. Coloured paper curtains were added to spacers behind the windows...one set is closed because the occupant is on night shift.
I did re-enforce the walls with additional 2mm card and added floors and ceilings to strengthen the building.
As the fronts and rears of the houses were low relief models, I had to fasten them together and join the rooves, modifying the chimney's to fit. I used some free imaging software to copy the brickwork and make new full width gable ends so there wasn't a join on the end walls.
Once the structure was complete, guttering and downpipes were added from plastic rod. The terraces were glued onto the road surface prints and await detailing (including barge boards)
Once positioned, it was obvious that I needed a backscene.
Back onto Google I found pictures of houses and streets and used the imaging software to eradicate wheely bins and satellite dishes before printing out to an appropriate size, cutting out and sticking onto the sky paper.
