Burghausen Lokalbahn

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• Scenery

The scenery consists of Styrofoam forms adhered (using white wood bonding glue) to the baseboard, cut or filed to representative shapes which are in turn covered with (two, maybe three) layers of bandages impregnatedwith GibStop (a plastering product used to fill gaps in ceilings and walls). One messy bit of work this. Plaster impregnated medical bandages (if you know where to get them) does the same thing but probably without as much mess.

Where rock faces were identified, blocks of broken cork bricks were thrust onto the still wet plaster and left to harden. The blocks were then gently removed. A coating of liquidy plaster was then applied by brush to the surface to weather the edges of the rock face. I tried crumpled up tinfoil as well to produce some rock faces but I think you will agree with me that the cork method is by far, the superior. It is surprising the size of scenery material you can use in this gauge.

The majority of the scenery is covered with flock. This is a nylon fibre material of 2mm to 3mm in length and is precoloured accordingly. This in turn has been covered with Woodland Scenic materials as and where applicable. Major commercial model building suppliers manufacture flock such as Faller, Vollmer, Kibri etc. There are several methods of applying this product to make it stand up vertically, from inducing static electricity with 6000 volts into the nylon fibres, to puff type bottles, to merely dumping the fibres into the glue and hoping for the best effect.

I had a quantity of plastic trees that were on sale in New Zealand some time in the late 1970's. They were actually the components that made up plastic Christmas trees. In there raw state they were pretty useless, very artificial, so I spray painted them in various shades of grey, hand painted the ends of the branches with white

  wood bonding glue, (talk about labour intensive) and placed the tree in a glass bottle with a quantity of green flock in it. After having screwed on the bottle lid, I shook the bottle until the flock had adhered to all the exposed glue. This simple process transformed an otherwise embarrassing excuse for a plastic tree into something acceptable and dare I say it, usable. However, the trees on this layout are primarily from Faller sprayed with Humbrol paints using any old (or new) bottles of coloured matt medium to medium/dark green to Olive Drab and the like that happened to be loafing around.

Buildings - well, I had some buildings that I had acquired for a penny and I thought I would use them at Kastl. They were pretty good but of course, I didn't have enough of them to do the full job of housing Kastl.

I weren't about to go out and buy some more buildings because they were the expensive Vollmer models. So I just forgot about Kastl for the time being and became frustrated about the fact that I couldn't afford to finish the station off. Until a so called friend of mine, Henrik Dorbeck, arrived on the scene one day and asked the obvious question as to what I had intended to do about housing Kastl. Tragically, I informed him that double the quantity of buildings were required and as Kastl didn't have sufficient finances, so the status quo remained. "No fear . . . .", said Henrik, "Got a modellers saw .?  I said that I had and I promptly left the room to make a cuppa, (as you do). When I returned, I had double the Vollmer buildings I had previously . . . ! Henrik had cut my expensive buildings in half - more than enough to house Kastl . . . Hurrah!

The town scene backdrop (upper right) is cut out of the centre page of a Vollmer catalogue (about the 1985 issue I believe) glued to Stencil board (a type of cardboard used in spray painting), and stuck on the Vollmer Cloud back scenery. Vollmer backscenes are used on the rest of the layout. The scenery at Waldhausen has the addition of cutouts that used to be supplied as a sort of Minitrix poster.

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