A Train Robbery - Diorama

It's been three months since I've posted anything to the blog. Being in the southern hemisphere, its summertime. That has meant I've been spending time with the family on outdoor adventures and the layout has not had much of a look in.

Since the kids went back to school a couple of weeks ago I've found some time to run some trains. I'm also building a diorama for my Dad to try and capture something of the essence of the train robbery at blue cut from the opening scene of the movie the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The diorama also is inspired by the song "A Train Robbery" from the 1980's album "The Legend of Jesse James", sung by Paul Kennerly. Levon Helm (who sung the part of Jesse on the album) also recorded a version of the song on his 2007 album, Dirt Farmer. 

A basic mockup of the scene to test the concept. More figures will be required further up the bank on the left.

The diorama is quite small and when finished will sit on a shelf in his study. As such, it is designed with only one viewing angle. This allowed me to experiment with some forced perspective techniques. The rails were glued to individually stained balsa wood ties and ballasted in place. They are S scale in width at the front and HO scale at the rear. The base is made from foam and covered with real dirt, static grass and rock moulds.

The trees are conifers, which line up with the words of the song. Although the movie shows deciduous trees. I chose to run with the conifers as I would need to produce less of them and also have found a technique I'm comfortable with using. They also block off parts of the scene and force you to look into the scene a certain way.

The backdrop was painted using my usual technique, learned from Chris Lyon on YouTube. However, I added a dark blue/black wash over the backdrop scene to try and mimic the feel of the night. 

The locomotive is a static 4-4-0 model of no particular prototype, made from leftovers in my box of bits. The drivers, stack, headlight and pilot are from an IHC 4-4-0, the boiler from a Roundhouse 2-8-0 and the cab from a Bachmann Spectrum 4-6-0. I filed off the arched roof and made a flat pitched roof from styrene. The chassis is carved from a chunk of balsa wood.  It still needs to be permanently assembled but I'm waiting till after I've installed the wiring for the lights. 

I repainted an Old Time Bachmann 4-4-0 tender and photographed it with one of my baggage cars. Manipulating the image in photoshop I created a cut out of the train to paste onto the backdrop. This gives the train an appearance of length and also contributes to the forced perspective.

The Diorama will have its own roof but no downlights. The only light will be from the locomotive firebox and headlight, the lantern at Jesse's feet and the sparks from the brakes and smokestack. I hope to be able to model some smoke to add some volume to the sky. I'm wondering if the explosion techniques used here by Bjørn Jacobsen for military dioramas could be adapted to locomotive smoke and wood sparks. It's worth an experiment anyway. Hopefully, all these elements will create a sense of drama and mood. 

The next step is to tackle the wiring for the lights. I need to give some thought to this as the diorama will sit next to two others on the shelf. The system ideally would power all three dioramas, and I need to make connections so each diorama can be plugged into the same power source. With the lighting in place, I can get an idea as to where the shadows may fall and that may inform the placement of the figures. Or then again it may not.