One of the enjoyable things about our hobby is the creativity and the products available for us to meet our creative wishes; be it building a layout, the running of trains or producing a themed diorama such as this one I will be escorting you through within this article.
At the Nuremberg Toy Fair back at the end of January, Noch announced this Haunted House kit, which reminded me of The Addams family films.
While waiting for its release, I designed my Halloween themed diorama. As is often the case, I started off with just the house, but extended the idea to a 1m diorama for display at exhibitions.
From the right-hand side of the display, we start at the Haunted House with its random room illumination, with ghosts appearing at the window and the sounds of moaning from within. Surrounding the house I planted the Leafless Trees from the Faller range. As you will remember, The Addams' house had the family graveyard. To represent the monuments I selected suitable ones from the Ziterdes range and standard gravestones came from Noch (N14211). The family car (next to Cousin It) was from Oxford Diecast. The fencing surrounding the graveyard and house is the iron fencing kit from Faller (FA180958) this was then weathered using Deluxe Materials Scenic Rust (DLBD-27). To further age the fence, slight heat was applied to the gates which were carefully bent and distorted.
Suitable figures having a slight resemblance to the Addams characters were produced by a friend of my husband. The children are playing in the graveyard and the husband and wife are standing on the porch about to greet their cousin. The chauffeur/butler is standing by the family car while the husband's brother is standing on the first floor roof howling to the moon!
Moving left, we enter the public graveyard complete with its Ruined Chapel produced by Noch (N58611) and in the corner of the creepy graveyard the Grim Reaper has called for his next victim. Vampires from the Preiser range are being buried after having the wooden stake driven through their hearts, whilst those in the ruined chapel are just awakening and leaving their coffins whilst being protected by the wolves, the known friend of the vampire. Roaming round the creepy graveyard and foreground are zombies haunting out their prey, these are from the Noch range (N15800).
As we move left (avoiding the zombies) we start to enter the forest created from the Noch Profi range of trees. We come across the Witch's Cottage, a laser-cut kit produced by Busch (BU1679) which consists of the animated witch on her broomstick flying above the forest treetops, the bubbling cauldron and the witches apprentice in the foreground.
The grass was reproduced using various lengths and shades of the Noch static grass range, applied with the original Noch Gras-Master Static Grass applicator, now upgraded and available in the Gaugemaster range (GM144).
To dress the diorama at exhibitions, further monuments were used from the Ziterdes range along with as a male and female G Scale Vampire from the Preiser range (PR45512 and PR45513), as well as newly released Marklin Halloween wagons within the start-up range (MN44232 and MN48620), which glow in the dark.
Although in this case the diorama was built with the intention of being shown on the exhibition circuit, you could always allocate a small section within your layout for themed dioramas. These could be temporary fitted within in it, such as Christmas, Easter, Halloween or anything that stimulates your imagination.
After visiting this year’s Toy Fair with my husband Kevin, I am looking forward to the release of Noch's Working Cross Country Ski Trail (N66832), which will be my next project.
Happy Modelling!