Box Construction

Before a box file layout can be made an amount of planning is required, but before that an idea is needed!

Once an idea is thought of I move onto the plan and design of the box. With an area of around 14"x10" there are limits of what can be fitted, but at the same time with such a small space every tiny part will be looked at. It certainly concentrates the mind!

There may only be a very simple of track, but it still gets planned out using PC Track Planning software. The track is actually a very minor part of the scene. It's the buildings and accessories that will make it live.

All of the current box files are made to N Scale (1/148)

The height of buildings is a huge consideration, the boxes are around 70mm tall, but that comes down to to 65mm once a base board is added. So anything over 65mm is out because the lid won't shut. Then there is the length and width of the box, no chance of a parish church, it's far too big (and too tall of course). Large railway buildings aren't that possible either, so often I'll build some thing from scratch so that it will fit.

Each box has a baseboard fitted. This is foam board that's available from several hobby shops. It gets cut to a tight fit, glued in place, and then covered in a coat of grey, green and brown emulsion paint.

The background scene is then added. This will either be a commercially available background scene, or more of late, a printout of a scene from the internet. I fix these to the box and inner lid using double sided tape.

The track is loose fitted at first so a suitable position for the power wires can be decided, usually somewhere along the back of the box. I use banana sockets and fit them to the back of the box and wire the track to them. Once this is done, the track is glued into position..... after a bit of testing!! We have a railway!

A lot of the boxes have some hills and rises, these break up the scene and also hide the railway in places so the all to obvious oval is not so obvious. The hills are crafted with more foam board, slowly built up with 5mm thickness on top of each other and all trimed and carved using a long blade of a craft knife. Once in place the hill is given a skim of a fairly wet filler and left to dry. Once dry it is sanded down and painted to seal. We now have our terrain!

Buildings! This is my favourite part. All the buildings in my box files are made from card and usually either from a bought kit (I use Metcalfe as they simply can't be beat in my opinion), or scratch built using Metcalfe's various builder sheets. If they are scratch built it's usually my own design but often based on something I've seen. I'll often use footprint template first in the box to see just how something will (or won't) fit.

Once the buildings and any walls are fitted it's time to add the ground work. This is always done after the buildings are placed so that the scatter used beds in the buildings - There is nothing worse than a dirty great gap between building and ground!

Finally the various people, animals, bits of street furniture, etc are glued into position.

Last but not least, every box gets it's name totem added to the inner lid.