Winter is a comin' on...

And when it does, I get all scenicky.  Come Spring and Summer it's boats and gardening, but as the days shorten and the shed becomes too cold to work in I come indoors and set up to work in the warm.  The scenery is always couched in an apparent love of railways, but really they are just an excuse for my particular kind of bucolica.
This has always meant muddy creeks and boats, shiplap and black tar varnish.

Now nowhere is that more concentrated than at Southwold.  A sleepy Victorian seaside town on the Suffolk coast, once quite a port and a big fishing centre.  Its foreshore is a collection of fabulously assorted shiplap sheds, converted railway vehicles and smart new, but still tarred shiplap.  Dozens of them. Between them are boats old and new, rusty winches, slipways, rotten wood, lobster pots and general, but lovely decay.
Here:-

Oh I love all this stuff.  And all the junk around it.

This is a Great Eastern 6 wheel coach which has been cut in half and brought in on a lorry presumably as the Southwold Railway was 3 feet gauge with an unusually narrow loading gauge, so couldn't have brought a standard gauge coach in, although the line ran just behind this scene all down the harbour to a weighbridge at the end, near the sea.

But how do you make a 7mm scale lobster pot?

See those buggers?  I've looked but I can't find any screedlike material that'll do that even if I make a wire frame.

Anyway, I started in 7mm scale to make the locomotive, Blyth, a 2-4-0 by Sharp, Stewart.

And the buildings, a smokehouse stall and a fisherman's hut.

These Foamex structures will be covered in strips of thin card to represent the shiplap so typical of the coastal shacks and sheds.

In between this I had promised a friend I would do him an Austin 7 Ulster for his new venture in slot racing and to help sell his new photo-etched 19" wire wheels.