Intercity 2018... At the Station

The main pic I wanted to do was a city station at night; something along the lines of New Street in Brum or Euston in London, a station crammed-in at low level amongst a mass of bigger buildings.

When I did the last lot of test shoots, the above pic was the one I felt happiest with, though I knew there was room for improvement, particularly as the choice of models was rather improvised with the setup.

As this shot demonstrates, the set-up was rather more complex this time.  The only thing that annoyed me was the kink in the track straight ahead, which was a limitation caused by having to prop-up the crates, whilst maintaining the double-track mainline so it would fit in with the rest of the shots, and the planned stop-motion video.  This shot used every crate/building, every light, every bit of track (to the point that the carriages on the left are just sitting on the baseboard as I'd run out of lengths of straight track) and most of the model carriages.  Also note the train on the other line; functional and able to move under its own power (the rest being static for the shots).

Oh and a bit of an in-joke which might just be visible on the end of one of the platforms; Birmingham New Street has a metal horse sculpture (one of several dotted along the route from Brum to Wolvo).  I was setting up the last details when I found a mini My Little Pony figure which Younger Child had left in the camera bag at some point, so it made it into the shots as the horse sculpture...

Mid-shoot.

Note too the Poundland bug-viewers on the platforms, doing admirable work as platform shelters.

I was pretty happy with how the shots came out, but the kink in the track was disrupting the flow of the stop-motion vid...

...but then I ended up exploring a third option for the pics, and taking shots both as if I was a photographer taking arty long-exposure pics of the trains, and also rotating the camera on the dolly to get shots as if from the window of the train.

More on these experiments, and also the other set-ups for the rest of the project (goods yard, skyscrapers etc) in the next post.