Vos Papiers THE 26 VOIE LIBRE/RAMMA CHALLENGES WERE FUN-PACKED AND CREATIVE

Twenty-six participants! And twenty-seven layouts, as one of the participants had built a two-part contribution. All this to say that the latest challenge jointly organized by LR Presse and the RAMMA club in Sedan was a great success with modellers. At the end of the show, we asked each participant about his or her motivations and invited them to describe their small imaginary world. Once the answers came in, we realized that beyond sharing a moment with other modellers, beyond mediating between modellers and visitors, taking part in a challenge also opens onto a different kind of modelling, onto a type of creativity that is seldom expressed. So, let’s give the floor to the creators, let’s listen to them presenting their layouts and let’s step with them into these whimsical universes.

RHAMA PAPERS

Thierry Josset

I’m actually a reformed boat modeller who has reverted to trains! The trend of railway modelling towards diorama micro-layouts coincides with my approach to creativity: generating an atmospheric scene is a very exciting intellectual and manual task. Building a faithful scale reproduction means compressing distances, using light. And when you have been accurately modelling the real thing for a long time, switching to something imaginary is tricky. That’s why I opted to build an exotic scene: located in Egypt, in the Nile valley, the layout represents a shop where all types of papers are sold. The small railway that serves the village is put to all kinds of uses and a wide range of machines can be seen running on it: speeder, locotractor, rubbish skip…

RECYCLING OLD PAPER

Michel Lecoursonnais

This is a family business, specialized in recycling. It was founded by the grandfather, who started by collecting rabbit and mole skins. Nowadays, the grandson recycles newspapers, advertisements and cardboard packaging. The train, a left-over from the past, has been preserved! It is used to carry crates of bulk paper, moving them into a warehouse where they are packaged into bundles, and transferring them to the processing plant. The trickiest part of the challenge was to find an original topic! After having scouted out old buildings, I built the layout: two turnouts, a few inches of track and two fiddleyards. The buildings are made out of peeled foamboard, covered with filler material, while the roofs call on Redutex sheers. The locotractor is a plastic body fitted to an Arnold chassis. Building this layout took a lot of time, but was great fun!

GONE WITH THE WIND

Philippe Gabard

I enjoy having constraints, they stimulate