A Challenge

This interesting item wandered across my e-mail this morning while I was trying to look interested about black goo (the goo industry has been going well lately). Its an interesting challenge concept for the 2010 convention, and one that sparked my eye. I've tried to embed it, but failed so here it is in its entirety.

The A3 Modelling Competition.

This competition is designed as a bit of fun; it complements but does not supersede the NZAMRC competition and has a different aim. Whilst we will be happy to see the highest standards of scratch building equal weight will be placed on an out-of-the-box set up – what we are looking for here is for people to build something that they can be proud of, maybe use at their local train show and to enjoy themselves. It need not require a massive investment and should be complete in itself although it may be designed for incorporation in a larger layout at a later date. It is also an ideal opportunity to step outside your comfort zone and maybe try a new scale, period or country.

The rules are simple – to build a layout or diorama on an A3 footprint. We are looking for ingenuity here so if you can find a way of interpreting this other than as below please feel free to do so however the classic interpretation is:

A layout or diorama, excluding the support structure or any detachable parts when detached whose area (not shape note) does not exceed that of an A3 sheet of paper. If cassettes are used their area counts only when attached to the layout and only the deck of traversers or sector plates is counted in the area. There is no restriction on height, gauge, scale or period – that bit is up to you.

An A3 sheet of paper is 297 x 420mm – therefore a layout of 596 x 210mm is perfectly acceptable as is a circle of radius 199.25mm or any odd shape in between. If your layout has cassettes then these come from the total area when connected – this does mean that you may use a single cassette in multiple locations or multiple cassettes as long as they are not all connected if the total area exceeds that allowed.

Interpretation of the rules will be at the discretion of the organisers and the judge – our guest speaker – and their decision is final.

This is meant to be fun so there is no legalistic scoring system – inventiveness and atmosphere will be the deciding factor. The prizes will be awarded for best diorama, best working layout and the Speaker’s prize for ingenuity.

Inspiration:

http://www.wymann.info/ShuntingPuzzles/index.html
http://carendt.com/

Now this has got me interested in a number of ways. We are the only scale in this country with a decent sized following that could actually assemble a modular layout based on this concept, along the lines of http://www.t-trak.org/ but larger. Maybe this needs to be debated some.