“The Pass of Killiecrankie”

T-gauge:    scale 1:450, or 0.68 mm/ft

Campbell Russell

The model began using whatever board I could find in my garage and it was designed around that board. The model depicts the railway viaduct and NTS Visitor Centre at Killiecrankie more or less to scale; the bridges at Bridge of Garry are more or less to scale but the distance between them and the Visitor Centre has shrunk dramatically on the model.

The construction is very much “old school”: the viaduct, bridges and buildings were photographed to within an inch of their lives.  The viaduct was then drawn to scale and made out of card and painted with acrylic paints.  The bridges and buildings were drawn to 2mm/ft scale, painted using acrylics, reduced to one third size on a computer, printed on 190gsm matte photo paper (or on to an OHP slide transparency), cut out and glued with PVA.  As a guide to the size of the buildings, the Visitor Centre building with the 3 corner towers is 55 mm long.

The cars and vans came as kits; the people came ready painted on a sprue of plastic and the photo of the lorry kit will give a clue to the size - that’s a twopenny piece underneath the kit with the driver sitting on the edge of it.

The model is 6'6" long by 13" wide and sits on a bookcase.  It is a simple circle with one loop and was roughly 6 years in the making.  It was shown during construction at several of my local Art Club’s Annual Exhibitions where it drew attention from many “non-railway” folk who marvelled at it’s small size  – especially when the HST went past with lights at both ends, white at the front and red at the rear, which changed colour when the train changed direction.