Conway Street bus depot

Left: A Bristol FS in Southdown livery leaves the western garage to take up daily duty. Behind is the eastern garage. Appropriate near-scale model cars and the Lesney milkfloat help complete the scene.

that the building sits on top of the depot floor. Next the pavements were added. Again a sub-base was made from corrugated card which was covered with paving slabs, again from the Metcalfe range. Many of the flagstones had to be shaped to fit around the building walls and numerous doorway recesses. This also helps to visually `bed-down` the building structure. At the various vehicular depot entrances varying thicknesses of card were used as a sub-base to give a realistic ramp to the outside roads. This, together with all the road-side gutters were covered with cobbled stone sheets cut to size, again supplied by Metcalfe. The paving was also extended within the western garage around the office block.

  At the positions of the various office block doors that lead out onto the garage interior, aseries of safety barriers were positioned. These barriers were fashioned from paperclips which were left unpainted to represent steel.

  The Metcalfe bus garage kits are designed for only one roof frame per wall section. In reality the framework supporting such a large structure is closely spaced. To model an accurate number of roof supports would look good but would also create problems when it came to positioning of model buses

so a compromise was reached by reducing the frame- work by 50%.

  The Metcalfe roof-formers were not actually used in the diorama structure, instead these were used as templates for double-span frames cut out from the surplus tarmacadam sheets. A huge girder was also made to support the cetres of the double-spans on the east-west axis (western garage) and north-south axis (eastern garage). The undersides of the roofs were strengthened with card, cut to the internal wall measurements. To add interest, a non-working sliding partition door separating the workshop area from the (western) garage parking area was included. This was built from card and surplus glazing left over from the amalgamated kits. All the roof frames, girders, the roof undersides and the sliding partition were painted cream with watercolour paints. Within the workshop area, two work benches were built using matchsticks and balsa wood which was then painted grey. Upon these benches, paint pots (made from half-length chimney pots from a Wills Accessory Builder Pack) were added.

  The office block section was fitted with a flat roof, again Metcalfe tarmacadam sheet being employed.

left:  the two-bay paintshop and part of the office block and stores. Note the safety barrier, one of three on this diorama, which are in reality shaped paperclips.

right:  the paintshop and part of the western garage viewed from above with centre roof section removed. Although not very clear, on the back wall are two workbenches with paint pots.