Friends of the Rail Forum

Africa is famously a religious continent, where religion is a holistic part of everyday life rather than being sectioned off as in much of northern Europe and north America, so it would be unthinkable to have a model railway without places of worship. I have a couple of churches to build, but I decided to start with the mosque as it looked interesting.

It's a model of a Turkish railway mosque which my nephew got for me from Russia on eBay. The printing on the box is all in Cyrillic script, and the very clear instructions contain only pictures and numbers, no words, so I don't know anything about the manufacturer. It's a beautifully made kit, neatly printed on both sides of coloured card, and the pre-cut and scored lines are very accurate indeed, not needing any trimming. It's easy to build and it fits together beautifully, with no glue - it has strong tabs which lock into slots. I may add a bit of glue later just to give it a bit of extra strength assuming that people will handle it carelessly at some point. I finished the whole thing in a couple of hours this afternoon.

The Catholic cathedral and the protestant chapel. The former is a Bachmann USA (Plasticville) clip together plastic kit, the latter is a Wills plastic kit.

I've started building the Anglican cathedral. It's a wooden kit from Lasermodel, a company that makes fantasy wargaming kits. It has a removable roof, presumably so you can have model soldiers slaughtering each other inside the church. You can also buy a war-damaged version of this kit. It's what wargamers call 28mm, which makes it 15 to 20% overscale for OO, but cathedrals are supposed to be huge, particularly when the colonial power is trying to prove to all-comers that its faith is better than all the others. There's also a Catholic church, a mosque and a small chapel on the layout, so there's plenty of competition!

It didn't come with any instructions because you're supposed to find them online at the company's website, and when I went to the link it wouldn't open, but it's a fairly simple kit so I figured it out fairly quickly.

There is no window pane material included in the kit but it's simple enough to cut it from old clear plastic packaging. I made some of the windows clear glass, and others stained glass, by splodging acrylic paint onto the clear plastic before fitting it. I'm going to fit LED lights inside so that the stained glass windows will be easily visible.

The windows are huge, and since I'm placing this at the front of the layout people will be able to see in clearly, and it looks very bare indeed inside, so I'll have to make some pews and other bits and pieces for it.

On the work bench, testing the interior lights.

The mosque is taller than the cathedral, although I am planning to put a flagpole flying St George's flag on top of the tower. The cathedral is a typical plain solid, stolid even, English church, while the mosque has a much lighter and more decorative air to it.