The Little World

If you wish to give yourself a treat – for about $ 40 a throw – go down to the hobby shop and look at the OO/HO building kits. You’ll find them for British, North American, and European buildings, and there is hardly anything that you can imagine that cannot be bought. If you stray into the wargaming section, you can get them bombed-out and shot through with anti-tank guns.

Heck, they won’t even let me do that here in our suburb – so this is the next best thing to a 17 pounder.

Not only do you get industrial and commercial properties, but residential and urban ones as well. Also municipal things like water works and city parks. They are all designed to allow model train builders to make interesting layouts – but those of us who make other things can also benefit. I cherry-pick buildings and accessories to fill out my model airfields and have been happy with the result. Of course I always want more but then that is a condition of human life on Earth.

But the very profusion of the things suggests something to me…What if you wanted to make a model layout that had no focus – no railway or airfield or other model component. What if the model you were making was a model of just a town or city? Singapore has done this for themselves with marvellous layouts of their urban and outer areas. I was entranced to see it in 2014 and look forward to a return visit one day when even more of the layout will be filled in.

My own little worlds start in my mind, and are sketched – for the most part – with the help of ready-made components. the Singaporean modellers are proceeding from basic materials and plans. They are the champions so far. More power to their modelling knives and paint brushes.