Giger gothic train set

[Anonymous]

I want to try to build a addams family style train set, which is also a tad giger style, maybe a kind of miny hell section, and large graveyard.

Is there any websites that sell gothic type pieces for trainsets?

Also is there anyone that can help me with layout?

[Anonymous]

I have used stuff from Games work shop and any miniture store can help you get grave yard stuff. Have used many diffrent buildings and heavly weathered them to look old and goth

[Anonymous]

Games Workshop (and other wargaming suppliers) are probably your best bet for this - you might also want to look for toy castles in roughly the correct scale - there's a few out now in connection with the "Lord of The Rings" films, with a little paint, weathering, detail etc they might be ok.

[Jetrock]

Woodland Scenics does a graveyard kit, complete with fence and headstones. Check the Walthers catalog--there are a few European models of castles and haunted houses that would be very suitable for making a layout that looks like something out of the Tim Burton "Batman" films, as well as some interesting Victorian and Art Deco style buildings.

If you're interested in traction, most trolley lines had lines that went to the graveyard, as well as "funeral cars" featuring black color scheme and lots of decorative scrollwork.

1930's streamlined steam engines would fit into such a theme well--the T1 is a personal favorite. Although any early 20th Century locomotive would do well for a gothic/industrial theme--after all, most of them were black (hand/staple/forehead)! For something with a definitely Giger-esque appearance, start by cannibalizing some components from an Alien/Aliens type model kit, then get a relatively cheap used steam locomotive you don't mind subjecting to hideous abuse, and go crazy with a razor saw and some squadron putty! Giger was into very bio-mechanical type forms, so things like fleshy, sinewy steam lines would be featured on the sides, with perhaps a nice Queen Alien head stuck on the front of the locomotive, with a proboscis-looking smokestack on the crest, illuminated headlamps in the eye sockets, and a front pilot/cowcatcher made of stainless steel alien teeth! The paint job would almost certainly be a dingy silver over undercoats of grimy black--lots of texture.

If you can find it, take a look at the cover of Motorhead's "Orgasmatron" album for an idea of what such a beast might look like...

Rolling stock...hmmm, if you wanted to go crazy with it, you could get a passenger car (either astainless-steel dome car or an old clerestory-roof observation car) model and model a nightclub inside: put down a floor with a bar and DJ booth at one end and some tables on the other, and some custom-painted miniatures doing the taffy-pull in the middle, with a couple of colored lights converted from interior lighting kits. You could even stick a mini MP3 player and speaker inside one end, set to play "Headhunter", "Bloodletting" and "Bela Lugosi's Dead" etcetera. (Actually, one concept my wife and I considered briefly was renting a car from a local tourist railroad and holding exactly such a nightclub on the tracks one night--but the cost was prohibitive in the real world!)

Industries can fit the theme--if you've got a layout with a graveyard, businesses nearby will reflect their needs, such as gravestone carvers (which will need shipments of quarried stone) and casket manufacturers (which will need wood from lumber mills.)
I've considered some ways to integrate these ideas onto my own layout: My layout doesn't have a graveyard actually on it, but the entrance to one (taken from a real-world photo) will be on the backdrop (it was one block from the graveyard!) and will have a casket-making factory that was served (albeit via team track) by the railroad I model. My wife and I were most pleased when we passed a casket factory in Burlington while taking the California Zephyr home from Chicago--we got many photos.

If you're looking for more of a gearhead theme, there is a lot of heavy industry you can model--chemical works, oil refineries, steel smelting plants--lots of stuff to fit that Industrial Records motif.

My chosen period is the Thirties and Forties in my hometown, which means I'm going to shoot for a very late-deco/film-noir type atmosphere. I also hope to include some miniatures representative of some of my friends in the "scene" (I've been involved in the gothic/industrial scene, as well as the punk and noise scenes, for about fifteen years--DJ'd and ran my own club for a couple years, etcetera.) I'm more focused on modeling the specific period and prototype but don't mind focusing on elements that appeal to me--I plan on including several seedy "dive bars" and red-light districts that were located near my prototype.

Modeling this sort of thing would definitely be a challenge in terms of doing lots of kitbashing and detail work, but you'd have one heck of a railroad and it would definitely be unique!! Keep us updated and if I can provide more weird ideas let me know...

[Anonymous]

WOWIE COOL IDEAS GUYS!!!!! [:D]

Well since I am new to modelling, this will be a challange, but hey I need to attempt it sometime.

We have a games worshop very close, so that should greatly help.

Modelling I have a cool mate at cool who could help me with this.

I probably will have little grass, maybe all grey dark gravel. Making it look dead, maybe I could have a little cliff, with a fire pirt below it? Maybe even a train track to hell.

Instead of water, I want to make pools of toxic purple sludge, with some skulls floating in(games worshop). An old factory would be a good idea. Maybe open graves, and some zombies taking a little walk.

Again since I am new to all this, I require some help, as I have no idea with scale etc, so is there anyone that can help me plan the layout?

Actually one idea I have had for a while, is to get an old pub snooker table (the one with a glass side to show you the balls, and put train tracks within that.

Hmmmm now I need a thing called money, Oh who is best for buying model trains, are hornby any good for thease types of things?

[Anonymous]

Hornby make good trains, but they're British rather than American. You'll have problems mixing the two as Hornby model 4mm-1ft OO scale while the US manufacturers model 3.5mm-1ft HO scale. Both use the same track gauge though. Hornby have been improving their locos recently - the new Q1 would probably fit in superbly with your idea, these were weird-looking locos. The Streamlined Coronation loco might also be worth a look. Here's a couple of links to pictures of these models - the site they're on offers very good mail order service.
www.ehattons.com/view.asp?ProductID=974
http://www.ehattons.com/view.asp?ProductID=2894

[Jetrock]

Nykylai hasn't explicitly said so, but I am guessing that he is in England--"Games Workshop" is a company familiar with gamers in the US but their chain of gaming stores is in the UK, and certain of his verbiage (mate, snooker, pub instead of friend, pool, bar) and the mentioning of Hornby (well-known UK, almost unknown US.)

anyhow--Nykylai--Scale is going to be an issue for you, as Games Workshop miniatures are far bigger than the most common size of model railroad (in the UK, British OO.) This means that people will be grossly out-of-scale compared to your trains. Larger scale trains, in O scale, will be too big! There is a scale, S scale, which is fairly close to GW miniature standards (1:64) but it's rare in the US, and I'm not sure if it is available at all in the UK.

But then again, I know that OO is a bit bigger than HO (1:76 or so vs. 1:87) so maybe GW 28mm miniatures will be reasonably close--or maybe you won't mind having the engines being a bit smaller scale than your figures, although this would make it very difficult to make use of OO scale miniatures and structures.

My next bit of advice would be to head to a local shop that specializes in model railroad accessories and see what sort of things strike your fancy there, rather than going to Games Workshop first and trying to make a model railroad fit their stuff.

[Anonymous]

Games Workshop's Warhammer 40'000 range is a fairly good match for N scale - I used a few tanks as loads for flatcars when I gave up wargaming. They also looked good positioned in the scenery.

[Jetrock]

I assume you're referring to the 40K Epic-scale miniatures, rather than standard 40K minis which are closer to S scale. The epic-scale stuff is supposedly about 1:285 (like other miniatures companies' micro-armor equipment) but Citadel always makes their stuff a bit more chunky than everyone else's (their 25mm line always stands a head taller than every other miniature company's figures) so yeah, Epic stuff next to N scale equipment wouldn't be too far off.

It would be harder to convincingly do skeletons and other such human-sized bits in N scale, though--the figures are far too teeny for an unskilled modeler to paint very effectively. The 28mm stuff with British OO, on the other hand, might not be too horribly off-scale...tho I've never seen a Space Ork standing next to an OO-scale miniature either.