The Goat Shed

I assume Swiss walkers and landowners are a bit like the English when it comes to walking all over, and having people walking all over their property. After the trot down to Wattinger Curve, the second most walked-upon farm in Switzerland by trainspotters would have to be the one up to The Command Post.

A squillion railfans must have have walked up to the top of Wassen village, passed under the second level of track, turned left and climbed the well-trodden incline. Up past a pair of houses, through the short stand of trees, past the goat shed (gingerly, after being startled by the sudden movement inside and tinkling of goat-bells!) before climbing up the zig-zags to the third level.

So I'd better make a tiny representation of it too. This was quickly assembled around a square of foamboard using a slate roof and thin card marked with a fine marker pen.

 The little open lean-to at one end was modeled from a box of styrene with more slate on top.

After the above pic was taken, I even included the little vacuum sucker tube that lifts hay from the open bit to the top floor attic (visible on both prototype pics).

I mixed up some orange for the roof tiles, and then washed some thinned black on to that and to the sides. I also drew on some rudimentary details like doors in the hope that nobody will ever look too closely at it's homely approximation of straight-and-square architecture.

Obviously it's smaller than scale to encourage some forced perspective as we look into the scene so it looks tiny when viewed from the 'wrong side' as below:

 It looks a little better from the normal side:

Not bad for ten minutes of effort - it was painted and installed before the glue was dry.

As much as anything the building also a bit of an experiment in scaling. To make my 'Wassen on a Door" look larger and more immersive than it obviously is, the houses up here, and the buildings in the village need to be downscaled to make things fit in, and the scales will get smaller the further back into the scene. These will probably look fine until a Z scale train winds its way past them. Mr B.A. Bodil was onto something with several different scales in a scene...