My diorama that brought me back to model railroading

[Biased turkey]

To resume the ( long story ):
My 80 years old mom went to visit our family in Belgium and brought me back ( as a birthday present ) a HO Marklin engine , the same I used to have as a kid 50 years ago.
The engine sat on the bookshelf for about 1 year.
Then I decided it deserves a better place to stay and while visiting a LHS here in Montréal I saw the Woodland Scenics HO scenery kit.
I had no previous experience with scenery so I purchased the kit and built it.
I'm glad I did , because even if that kit is a little expensive, it's a great way to introduce a model railroader to scenery and it contains all the materials required to build a diorama.

Jacques

So here is a picture:

[Steamtrains]

Jacques....It's always nice to have THE train/engine that got you going in this beautiful hobby....I (fortunately) still have the train set that set me on the way....An S-Gauge AF 0-8-0 and several pieces of rolling stock, plus track and transformer. I figure it was a little over 50 years ago that Santa brought it to me.. It's packed away, but one of these days I'll take it out, dust it off, and take some pics....

[Ralph]

That's some nice work Jacques. It shows off the locomotive beautifully.
Ralph

[Biased turkey]

Thank you Gus and Ralph for taking some of your valuable time to reply and for the encouragement .
The engine is not the original one I had when I was a kid. The original one was sold by my parents when I left home 30 years ago.
Maybe my mom was feeling guilty and 30 years later bought the same model for me lol.
Living in an apartment make it impossible for me to have a full HO scale layout, that's the reason why I went the N scale way ( I don't regret it ) .
BUT after visiting Carl Arendt's micro-layouts website I realise I still can build a switching operating layout ( even in a shoebox ) for my mom's present.
http://www.carendt.us/
Let's get back to the scenery topic, In my opinion, building and detailing a diorama is the best way for a newbie to have his/her feet wet at building scenery.

Jacques

As Gus mentioned :Childhood memory, priceless

[Trucklover]

Jacques, love the scene. I especially like the culvert The rocks look great as does the scenery and the ballast job

[Tyson Rayles]

Very nice, hard to believe you had never done scenery before!

[cnw1961]

Jacques, you really did a great job. How did you do the culvert? It looks fantastic.

[Biased turkey]

Thanks Josh, Tyson Rayles and cnw1961 ( Kurt) for the kind words.
The beauty of the Woodlans Scenics kit is that it included everything required to build the diorama:
The wooden frame, fascia, casted rocks, hydrocal, plaster cloth, culvert, liquid pigments, turf, trees, adhesives etc...
The only item not included are the newspapers to make paperwads
It has a 16 pages completely detailed manual so I have no excuse for not completing that diorama.

About the culvert, it is a 4 pieces casted hydrocal , so I glued the 4 parts together and used the included black wash to paint it.

To Kurt: I know you have a great North American theme layout, but I'm sure you are familiar with the reliable HO Marklin brand.

Jacques

[cnw1961]

About the culvert, it is a 4 pieces casted hydrocal , so I glued the 4 parts together and used the included black wash to paint it.

To Kurt: I know you have a great North American theme layout, but I'm sure you are familiar with the reliable HO Marklin brand.

The culvert looks so good, it had to be hydrocal .

Jacques, I am sorry, but I do not know anything about Märklin. Sure, when I was a kid about 40 years ago, my trains were all from Märklin, the #1 on the German market at that time. But since I came back to model railroading a few years ago, I never cared about Märklin. I started with North American theme layouts right away. Märklin is still a big one here in Germany and many German model railroaders would not touch anything else, but I know ten times more about Atlas or Athearn than I know about Märklin. BTW, your steamer looks exactly like the one I had when I was a kid.

[Biased turkey]

here are 2 more pics of it.

After seeing those pictures, I realise I should paint a black cardboard piece in black and insert it into the culvert hole in order to hide the paperwads.

Jacques

[Spitfire]

Very nice, hard to believe you had never done scenery before!

Really nice work - looks like you've been doing it for years!

Val

[Biased turkey]

Thanks Val for the kind words.
As I mentioned earlier, that diorama kit includes all the required materials and a highly detailed instructions booklet. So I had no excuse getting a poor result.
My mom appreciated that I built the diorama for that nice HO engine she gave me as a birthday present.
Now , as a joke, I tell her that instead of the Marklin engine gathering dust on a shelf it is gathering dust on a nice diorama.

And to be honest, as a child ( yes, 55 years ago ) when watching the display at my Marklin local hobby store I always wondered " How do they do for building that scenery".
Don't forget that 55 years ago there was no book nor webpage about that topic
Now, I got the answer

Jacques

[torikoos]

I could be wrong of course, but when I was young, Marklin starter kits used to have an engine extremely similar to yours, but it would be 3 axles, more precisely, it would be a BR80 (class 80, freely translated). Yours is a class 81 (BR81) which had 4 axles. The two classes are related in real life, but it was the 80 that was found in most starter sets. (also the first engine Marklin modelled in 1972 when they invented the Z scale, and promo pics at the time showed one inside a wallnut.)

I never owned Marklin, my parents couldn't afford it, and even as a child I did not like their 3 rail system on a metal ballast bed. I prefered 2 rail DC even then, and there were cheaper ones available then that did that. I then moved on to scale N for ages due to space constraints initially, and moved from there back to HO, but went US prototypes, and stuck there ever since :-)