As work slowly continues at Drag City Mk IV, I continue to race between both my Tyco and AFX tracks. Today I finished building the first diorama piece for the new track…well, its really the 2nd, but it’s the first I’ve built myself.
Good diorama pieces are often startlingly expensive; so it was with this piece. I bought this 1:64 replica of the famous LeMans Dunlop bridge from a vendor in NJ. I knew it was a kit that required assembly but I didn’t really know all the details, as it was described only as a “laser cut model.” From the photos it looked like it was made of balsa wood, which I thought would be really nice, so even at a lofty $56 I went ahead and bought it. With the postage included it came to just under $65! Imagine my disappointment when it arrived to find it was made only of cardboard and paper!
Nonetheless I went to work assembling it, which wasn’t all that easy considering that every single one of the little stairs was its own individual cardboard piece that had to be glued into place! It took the better part of a day to finish it, using a pair of tweezers to position each stair correctly. Unfortunately its still not 100% right, as some of it looks little crooked from some angles but, hey, its cardboard, fer crissake!
The label inside the package revealed this was made in Germany by a company called MGI. Oh, so its German…that’s why its so expensive! Well, no one can make things out of cardboard like the Germans, I guess.
Well, it does look pretty cool, I have to admit. While I still don’t think it was worth what I paid for it-and given the choice, I wouldn’t do it again-it does make a nice entrance into the spectator area of the new track, and it is a good start to what I hope will be a detailed diorama that will likely be years in the making. In the coming days and weeks I’m going to start delving more deeply into the existing diorama around Drag City Mk II, to show you some of the details I’ve created there, many of which will be migrating to the new track as construction continues, so stay tuned!
