Blurring the boundary
Ian Skinner’s fic titious ‘S&D’ layout is so believable you’d be hard ‐pressed to tell the fantasy from reality.
Words: Chris Gadsby
1
Photography: Chris Nevard
What makes this layout great?
“The best fictitious layouts are the ones which make you believe they’ve been based on the real location. Everything about ‘Burnham-on-Sea’ looks right, to the extent that we even pulled up old railway maps to see how accurate it was before we found out it was Ian’s imagination!”
‘N’ GAUGE LAYOUT BURNHAM-ON-SEA
Althoughthere are thousands of race tracks in the world, everyone wants to race around the streets of Monaco. There are thousands of golf courses, but everyone dreams of playing at Augusta National. Similiarly, there are certain regions of the United Kingdom railway network that have a lure about them, and seem to be modelled more than any other.
There are thousands of stations and locations in the UK worth modelling in miniature, but the Somerset and Dorset Railway must be towards the top of the list as most frequently modelled. Well, when you can model it, even with a fictitious location, as well as Ian Skinner has with his ‘N’ gauge ‘Burnham-on-Sea’, you can see why.
2 Nothing runs perpendicular to the edge of the baseboard, so it doesn’t look as though it’s a framed scene. The dairy is at less of an angle than Ian intended, but he put the wall at the front of it at a greater angle so it would look more in line with his intentions.