Safire Associates, Unit 008, Solent Business Centre, 343 Millbrook road, Southampton, SO15 0HW
Copyright 2024 © All rights Reserved. Design by Safire
A custom made scene / diorama of a 1/10 scale model section of a railway track.
This was created for the University of Southampton so it could be used in lectures, with students and with industrial clients that had an interest in the effects of the weather and ground water on railway systems also to demonstrate how railways are constructed.
We can work from photo’s, videos, sketches, cad drawings or 3d cad models, bringing your model to life. We use a variety of skill sets to create an item like this including but not limited to:
3d cad modeling, 3d scanning, digitizing, cnc water jet cutting, cnc machining, fabrication and welding. We can design and construct the temporary molds and jigs required and can adapt to learn and master processes that may not of been done before by us or potentially by others….
This model is truly as close to real as it can get in real life.
There is a selection of pictures on this page showing the quality of this scale model railway track and how it is used and put together.
This model represents a 1/10th scale section of a railway track and it has been made so it can be disassembled and re-assembled to demonstrate how a railway track line is built from the ground up.
In the image above you can see the end section view that shows how the ground is graded to the correct angle / grade and the various layers required to make up a stable railway track base that is also very efficient in ground water control.
Every single detail was re-created in this model to perfection.
Shown above in the two pictures you can see the model in it’s broken down state into it’s individual layers and components.
It starts with the base. We manufactured this base from stainless steel to give it a stylish look and a hard wearing base. But a lot of thought went into the design to make sure it is assembled in the correct way. As you can see here the three posts have been set to not only hold the layers in place but also they have be positioned so the layers can only fit on the stack in one direction to avoid setting up the model in-correctly.
The first layer is placed on the base. This represents the actual ground in real life and it has the correct graded angle in it as it would have in real life for ground water drainage.
Although it is our secret on the materials used and its construction, we made this from actual real materials that represent the type of materials in real life.
The next layer is basically a sand layer and although it is our secret on the materials used and its construction we did use real sand in the process.
The next layer in the stack is a geotextile membrane. This is a real geotextile sheet.
The next layer was constructed from scaled sized granite chippings which are what is used in the real life train track build, but we could not just have a compacted stack of granite as they would in real life so we did create this in a mold and we created the locations for the concrete sleepers. You can even see the oil stains created as you would have on a normal real life track.
The final section is the track assembly. It is shown here fully assembled and in use it stays like this and is lifted into the granite chipping layer when assembling. But it does all break down into the individual parts if required.
You can see the steel tracks, the clips and mounting pads and the concrete sleepers.
The whole model can be assembled in seconds and once it is all assembled it looks stunning and very realistic.
The realism is very high and the closer you get the more realistic it looks.
This was made as realistic as possible, the concrete sleepers were marked, scratched and dented, the railway tracks and fittings were rusted and polished on top, we even added oil stains to the granite chippings and the concrete sleepers.
Even when you get right up and close with the smallest components you can see they were made as per the real world ones. Shown here is the pad and clips, this is all working too!
The clips although very fiddly do pull out to release the tracks from the clip stays in the sleepers. There are rubber anti vibration pads under the railway tracks and insulating plastic clip pads on top.
You can also see the steel track is weathered and rusted on the sides and polished on the top as they would be in real life. The tracks were machined to exact size from solid bar stock on our cnc milling machine using 3d cad cam.
When not in use or on display it sits in it’s custom made storage case.
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