Conway Street bus depot

left: The western garage frontage and part of the office. Inside can be viewed a Southdown Queen Mary and two Lodekkas. Note the depot manager in conversation with a conductor whilst his driver looks on.

western garage (pictured above) it was decided to have a removeable centre roof section for ease of access to the models with an east-west axis to the roof-apex so some of the wall sections had their apexes removed.

  The printed brick can benefit by adding more dimension by lightly scoring around every brick and so this was done to all outer brickwork that would be `on show`. The scoring process can be very time-consuming but the visual effect is worthwhile even if not truely to scale.

  The diorama design encompassed the office block as an integral part of the western garage structure as opposed to being an `add-on` building as per card kit. To this end the office building sections from both kits were modified and combined, making a much larger structure. As such, the office occupies one-sixth of the western garage floor area. In order that all internal walls were matching, one of inside-garage office walls had to be `wall-papered` with cream colour brick. Fortunately Metcalfe supply sufficient spare cream colour brick card within each kit to allow this.

  The rear wall (north side) of the western garage consists of three kit wall sections. To disguise the joins from the interior side, matchsticks covered with brickpaper were added to represent brick pillars. This has the added adantage of

providing greater strength to the kits.

  Whereas in the Metcalfe card kits the garage entrances are built up into triangular pillars, on the diorama it was envisaged that the garage would be viewed as if looking outwards and so square pillars were built in the same way as the joins between the wall sections, using matchsticks and brick paper, thus giving a more realistic appearance. Similar techniques were also employed in the construction of the eastern garage.

  Once the western garage office block was built, internal office walls were made from corrugated card. These internal walls were interlocked to make a rigid box structure which helps to keep the whole block square. The corrugated card was faced with coloured card, cream for the walls with dark red to represent skirting boards. Where floors were visible through the windows, brown colour card was used to represent floorboards.

  Once all the garage walls and office block was built and joined together a template was made to allow for the fitting of a garage floor. Again Metcalfe card was employed, using the tarmacadam sheets. The completed western garage structure was then glued into place and the shaped garage floor was added so as to visually `bed-down` the building as opposed to giving the impression that