How I discovered Gn15
(and didn't learn to stop worrying about the bomb.)
When I was eight or nine, building a large OO scale layout with my dad was fun. We drew inspiration from an Edward Beal plan and used balsa-wood building designs by Ron Warring. The scenery on the branch-line station was completed before dad died, and I kept the branch-line until I went to university. It was such fun that recently I've been collecting the various plans, magazines and books on which the layout was based. Although the destruction of a partly completed layout during a break-in didn't help matters much, I think it’s been the lack of that sense of fun that’s prevented me from finishing all but the smallest of projects in the intervening thirty years.
Gn15 has given me back that fun: serious fun, but fun nonetheless. What makes it all so fascinating for me is the need to solve real-life problems in a scale where real-life solutions will work. The pleasure of sitting and thinking is at least as great as the pleasure of building. I sat on a train back from Plymouth, watching the waves crashing against the sea-wall, and came up with a concept for a one-hour locomotive project loosely based on some speeders from the Gn15 info site. It’s mostly finished, just waiting for details before I paint and weather it, at which point I’ll write it up. Meanwhile, it's formed the basis for an even madder project, of which more later.
My main project is Cuddle, detailed on my pd49 website, which is proceeding slowly, but I’m working on several other ideas including Wheal Oggy and Begijnendijk. With a little help from friends over several bottles of pettillant Vouvray, a 72” version of Cuddle using two locomotives has been joined by Blackwater Sand and Gravel (Fir Tree Wharf) and a various shoe-box ideas.
This means that I?ve got far more ideas than time, but that?s not a real problem with Gn15. Most layouts are small (although maybe one day I?ll build a large mining system or some such), and the impetus keeps me going. Because an operating layout will fit in the space occupied by a diorama in sixteen mil (my previous serious dabble) I can consider building a couple of different concepts that will allow me to get my modelling skills back up to speed. I?ll finish Cuddle eventually - currently I have the real baseboard completed, a smidgeon of scenery and mock-ups of the rest of the scenery - you can jump to the current episode of the story here. But I also intend to build Begijnendijk - another layout resulting from several coincidences - over the next few months, since that's meant to be for my wife.
Over one week in March I decided to actually finish something. A random posting on the Gn15 list about railways in Yucatan provoked lively and light-hearted debate including the use of live plants. For reasons too lengthy to go into here (but if you have a sense of humour, see the thread on the Gn15 list) I became the proud possessor of a dozen airplants and decided to build a simple layout to plant them on (there's nothing new under the sun, the basic track layout had been floated on Carl Arendt's site ages earlier, although I hadn't seen it).
The result was Cooperativa Verde del Oro. Several other people built these layouts. So I designed another layout 'Boxleiter's Famous Stout and Porter Store', to learn from my mistakes and incorporate others' ideas, which I intended to build on a Sunday I had free, but said Sunday was swallowed by other stuff and I had no more modelling time for a while. In the meantime, on the list Gerry Bullock had suggested moving the traverser inside and making it part of a car ferry scene, and Michael Mott suggested a factory scene with the traverser just inside the doors.
This put me in mind of the Hurtigrute ships that run along the Norwegian coastline. We had a holiday on Nordlys, one of said ships, in 2001 and I was fascinated by the forklift trucks (yeah, I know). None of the material saw the light of day at the time, but the idea stuck and I looked it out. The forklift piece is here and after more discussion and a great deal of thought, the idea of "Gnordlys" was born. The idea was to attempt to build it over just one day.
I haven't exactly got distracted by another small project that came from a discussion on the Gn15 list: I have indeed started on a small piece of track, but the technique I'm using for filling in the space around the track will also be applicable to Begijnendijk, so I bought enough materials to work on that small layout as well, and the figures I had to build have changed my view of the scale for the retort-house at Cuddle. Just as well I hadn't started building the real thing. It's all a case of rebuilding my modelling skills and applying the lessons learned to the other projects in turn.
If you want to see what it’s all about, I commend both Carl Arendt’s site, which is about micro-layouts in various scales, and Emrys Hopkins's Gn15.info site, which, as its name suggests, is Gn15 specific.