Inspired by Emett.

GN 15 Makes me Smile.

Just who (whom) or what is an Emett and why am I talking about him/her/it today ?

In Royal Navy parlance (Jackspeak) one of my former Ex Naval colleagues used to use the term Emetts to refer to the kind of tourists that she saw wandering aimlessly around the local RN dockyard city stuffing their faces with ice cream. Sometimes we would get them as patients when the inevitable event happened with their over worked coronary arteries. Today though i’m not dissing the tourists that I regard as grockles but rather i’m referring to an eccentric English artist, cartoonist and kinetic sculpture builder called Roland Emett : hands up anyone that has heard of him and/or seen examples of his work – I for, example, hadn’t but I recently had an internet deep dive into better and lesser known artists and illustrators and that’s where his work came up.

Where it all began.

For me, it actually came about as the (currently) end stage result of working on the idea of building a quirky model railway in my yet to be completed workshop. Those of you that follow my wandering mind will know that i’d already got past the exact scale rivet counters of one side of the railway modeling world and was at least as far as working quite seriously on the idea of a Terry Pratchett inspired layout cum diorama replete with it’s early Victorian styled railway and with the very Pratchett inspired secondary theme of an underground line in narrow gauge run by the Goblins – that even has a few pages of my own story line about it. I was far enough down that track to have decided on the scales and gauges I wanted to work with and even had a central idea of the kind of multi level landscape that it would be set in.

The way things worked out is that my idea based on Terry Pratchett’s novel Raising Steam never worked out and eventually I worked out that I wanted to work in a scale/gauge combination that firstly made me smile and with which I could quickly create vignettes that themselves tell a story. My eventual choice has moved through GN15 except that iv’e gone down a bit to a more conventional working scale (1:35) which is the scale that many military modelers work in and with which there is a lot of figures and detail parts already available.

Right now, in fact as I write, i’m building the baseboard for my 1:35 mine diorama that has a minimum gauge (OO) railway built into it – I even have the beginnings of a locomotive still in it’s packaging on my work table so it’s definitely being worked on. In the future, my model, which already has a name in my mind, is already spawning a second diorama/layout idea although in the far future I may come back to the Roland Emett inspired idea after I have made some clay figures or 3D prints of the various characters I would like to portray . For that think Beryl Cook meets Eric McGill of naughty seasisde postcard fame.

One of my online search sessions took me to the Pinterest page for quirky and steampunk- esque locomotives and while there I kept noticing a few very odd looking models that I returned to again and again : they turned out to be model interpretations of Roland Emett inspired loco’s and even later I came across some videos of entire Emett inspired model layouts. At the same time I came across something in model railways that I hadn’t seen before : the world of GN15 models and layouts. I guess that most readers won’t have fallen into that rabbit hole so here first is the Wikipedia link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gn15 In short and for those that can’t even bother with the TLDR it’s railway modeling using a scale of 1 : 24 but a gauge of 16mm thus running on standard OO gauge track and using common commercially available mechanisms built into custom bodies. Like it’s builder I seem to have more ideas than there are hours in the day.