JRM at 2011 Ekoji Buddhist Temple Obon Festival

[cteno4]

Last weekend we had our second visit to the Ekoji Buddhist temple's Obon Festival. Like last year we brought an 8' japanese streetcar loop as well as Curt's unitram loop. it was a lot of fun again. this year i built a temporary partial train station and shinkansen line over one end of the street car ttrak loop. this really helps deal with the standard spaced ttrak curves that are really tough to cut street sections to match up to the rail curves! Also is nice as the trams disappear for a while under the station. Also was a way to display some regular trains and part of a shinkansen on the ttrak as we only did not have the big layout at the show to run them on.

more pictures up at:

http://japanrailmodelers.org/photos/2011obon/index.html

cheers

jeff

[linkey]

LOL, I just saw Godzilla right on the bottom right hand corner of the photo, after seeing this green thing near the building and I was trying to work out what it was until I followed where the went to! We always love to add a monster to our layouts :P

[Hobby Dreamer]

Nice job!

I bet those attending were wowed by this. Your B&W photos (on you link) looked great!! Almost thought it was the real deal..

I don't know what the quality of non-Japanese stuff is currently, but the structures, station and Unitram track look amazing!!!

Great taxi cabs as well!!!

Cheers
Rick

[cteno4]

Rick,

thanks, Aaron (monorail cat) did the great B/W shots. definitely a nice touch to making the model stuff feel real!

the station was something i have been thinking about for a long time and started to work on the week before the festival, but i got sidetracked with work and ended up throwing it together late the night before the event. kato stuff is so great for doing something like this, its all kato parts. I had started to do a plaza scene for in front of the station there, but ran out of time to set it up with a fountain, bus stops, etc. Now that i know the idea works well i want to do it up well. not sure if i will cement down the station, platforms, tracks, its so cool to set up in like 3 minutes and fits in a pretty small container when broken down!

i just glued up a foamcore stand for the station over the tracks and station building. then the day of the event when i stopped at curt's house on the way i realized i had forgotten the foamcore support. but luckily curt had a hunk of foamcore sitting around about the right size so i was able to hack together something close in 5 minutes at his house and it worked well.

we had one little kids about 3 years old that could barely see the trams at the edge of the table. he was mesmerized for must have been a total of an hour on many visits during the day. he would run from one end of the layout back to behind the station and pause then laugh and run out to the side of the layout. i couldn't tell what was making him laugh and then i realized he was the only one that could see the trams running under the station in the back from his low low vantage point!

Also thanks to Bernard as two of the platforms on the station are his donation to JRM last year! I want to put some figures on the platforms so ill have to have one of him and a film crew he is directing!

cheers

jeff

[Shashinka]

the BW's posted look muddy compared to what I have in AILS right now. 

[cteno4]

you are right, i did not touch them, but the got spit out a bit dark and muddy. i just went in and popped them up some, now they look more like the original. gamma also does more of a darkening number on the darker bw photos as well. at least that issue will go away with time here!

see what you think now.

jeff