Rather Camp

Rather Camp is the home of the Royal Serene Yellow Jackets (infantry regiment) and the Rather Horse (armoured corp.) this army base includes several tanks, huts, an assault course and military train.

Royal Serene Yellow Jackets
Serene's infantry regiment wears a resplendent ceremonial dress with its bright yellow jacket over black trousers and a black bearskin hat. (A group of these are at the funeral of General Edmund LeTrick at Rather Major's St. Trinian's church.) Several others are on the Rather Camp parade ground and on guard at the castle. The Royal Serene Yellow Jackets are made from Langley Models and Airfix Guardsmen figures.

The Rather Horse
Originally a cavalry regiment the Rather Horse is now fully mechanised with a WW1 Mk IV Tank, several Churchill and Sherman Tanks (yes I know they post date my layout but not by much and I like them) and several Vickers MK II Tanks being refurbished (scratch built by me using styrene sheet). Contrasting with the Royal Serene Yellow Jackets, the Rather Horse ceremonial dress consists of a bright green jacket and plume over brown trousers with silver helmets and breast plates. These were created from Italeri French Heavy Cavalry. Several of these are on parade and as is normal with horses, several, have small piles of manure behind them.

Accommodations
Several huts were made from Heljan Wood Railroad Hotel kit and corrugated iron styrene sheet to accommodate the troops. Besides these there were several Nissen Huts or Quonset huts

Nissen Huts (or Qunset Huts) have a 16 foot diameter by 20 foot long. While browsing the web I discovered a site describing building Nissen Huts by winding string around a cardboard tube (I cannot remember the web address - if anyone knows, please let me know). The cardboard tube can be the centres of toilet or kitchen rolls as these are about the right diameter. You need to cover the cardboard rolls with a PVA glue before wrapping the string around the roll. After wrapping the string around I gave it several washes of diluted PVA. When this is dry the roll is trimmed to length and cut in about half (with scissors) to make the characteristic shape (of a half circle or just over half a circle). To strengthen and straighten the cut edge I glued lengths of matchsticks. I infilled the ends with circles of corrugated boxes. I made these storage huts and so did not have to cut windows and only needed to glue on a rectangle of cardboard to represent a door!

From the box a new television came in I had some double walled corrugated cardboard that was just right. I marked a circle on this using the bottom of a wine glass. These circles were just larger than the inside of the cardboard tubes. But as there was some play in the cardboard tubes and, happily, the resulting hut was pretty well exactly a scale 16 foot diameter. I cut the circles from the corrugated cardboard using a hobby knife. Next, I marked circles on thin brown card from a pad of lined paper and cut out using scissors. I scored lines on these circles to represent sheets of plywood and cut a doorway.

The huts looked OK but I was not completely happy with the roof and so covered this with of tissue paper to represent corrugated iron. The corrugated iron sheets used on Nissen Huts are 10ft by 2ft 2 inches (35mm by approx 7mm). But I used a 12 mm width as this would be the width of the flat sheet before corrugating. Originally I thought to use individual sheets of corrugated iron but eventually I used strips across the hut and then 35 mm long rectangles across the top.

I then painted the roof with silver paint and applied a light wash of rust coloured paint to cut the brightness of the silver and simulate the effect of age. I did not paint the ends as the card was the right colour to represent plywood.

Barracks Huts: Besides the Nissen Huts, I scratch built several huts to provide sleeping and other accommodations. These were approximately four inches long by 1.3 inches deep (a scale 30 ft by 9 ft). For the fronts of the huts I used walls and windows from the Heljan Railroad Hotel and roofs of styrene sheet.  But, instead of using  Heljan Railroad Hotel walls for the back of the huts, I used Shiplap embossed styrene sheet sandwiched with thicker styrene and so conserved my stock of Hotel walls. For the sides, I used parts of the sides of a Heljan Canadian Water Tank kit.

Assault Course
A small area of the camp is dedicated to an assault course made from various materials (Kebab Sticks, net curtain etc.). Working their way though the assault course are several soldiers from the Royal Serene Yellow Jackets (but not in their ceremonial dress).

Armoured Train
Naturally there is a rail spur with an armoured train with an armoured engine and a rail gun (modified kit). The armoured engine was made by scratch building a styrene sheet armoured body that I mounted on top of a standard N scale locomotive. The rail gun was a Dragon 1/144 scale Leopold Rail Gun widened and mounted on N-scale bogies.  I widened the rail gun to approximately 1 inch (25 mm) wide but otherwise built it as it was. Taking into account the scale change, this meant that the gun was an eight inch one.

Parade Ground
There is a small Parade Ground with the band of the Royal Serene Yellow Jackets playing and parading. I used sand paper to represent a gravel surface to the parade ground.

Vehicles
Tanks: The Rather Horse have a range of tanks ranging from a WW1 Mk IV Tank (Corgi), several Churchill Tanks (Corgi and Roco Minitanks) and several Sherman Tanks (Roco Minitanks). The Churchill and Sherman Tanks are later than the period modelled but not much.

Trucks: Here I used a variety of Roco Minitank models.

The Module
The module is a standard module (22.4 inches long by 15.25 inches wide by 3 inches deep).