Bahnhof Igelfeld
Gallery
Background
Igelfeld is a Z-gauge micro layout built in a usefully-square guitar case. The layout is a bucolic branch line set somewhere in southern Germany in the middle of the last century.
My father turned 60 in 2008, and spent some time in the run-up to this event reminding us that he should really get a special present - preferably a no. 10 Meccano outfit!
This was a bit out of my price range, but I wondered if something home-made would be more fun. I'd been doing some railway modelling since we emigrated, naturally without getting anything finished, and wondered if I could build him a small layout to give somewhere to run his vintage Z-gauge stock. I sounded my Mum out on the prospect and she thought it would be a good idea. So suddenly I was committed.
A long day going round junk shops, music shops and a variety of others turned up a second-hand guitar case built like a steamer trunk for $50. I settled on this since it had a short dimension a little over that required for minimum (145mm) radius Märklin curves. I added a couple of ribs inside the case to raise up the intended board so the track would be level with the top and make some space for storing stock underneath. Other than that, the case is as bought - much too nice to fiddle with really.
We managed to keep the whole thing secret right up until the present was unwrapped, which was quite tricky. At the time my parents lived about two minutes away and my dad was in the habit of dropping around, a nice thing to do but it meant a lot of mad rushes to hide the work in progress.
Construction
The baseboard is a light (ex 1" square) timber frame with a 50mm Styrofoam top and 3mm MDF profile boards. The end boards have handwells in them which allow it to be lifted out of the case. The left-hand handwell also gives access to the tunnel interior for rescues, and the right-hand one contains the controls, so no space is wasted.
Scenery was carved from the Styrofoam and coated with Polyfilla and sand before painting. Several layers of various scatters (mostly Woodland Scenics and Jordan) were applied as appropriate with wet water and dilute PVA. The river is acrylic gloss gel mixed or surfaced with gloss medium - it really needs more coats but I was running out of time in the last week.
Structures are a mixture of repainted Märklin, Faller and Vollmer kits, mostly modified slightly to reduce their size. I pinched the goods depot from my father's stash of old buildings, cut it down a bit so it didn't dominate the small space, and weathered it. The farmhouse was also modified to reduce the height by leaving off the bottom storey and creating a new door in what was the first floor.
Figures are the usual Preiser and Noch, prepainted. I have no desire to paint Z-scale figures - putting the red stripes on the arms of the crossing sign was challenge enough!
Outings
Igelfeld appeared at Railex 2008 in Porirua where it behaved pretty well provided we didn't attempt to shunt the siding... In painting and ballasting the turnout I think I must have bent one of the point blade contact strips and we had trouble getting good contact. Hopefully we can fettle it up before next year. Luckily no-one seemed to mind if the trains just went round and round - we certainly enjoyed watching them get a good run, and would like to thank the organisers for inviting us, and fellow Gnatterboxers Gavin and Paul for arranging it all!