Chris Thorpe wants to create a replica of trains using lasers.
Like any serious hobby, model trains offer the enthusiast any number of rabbit holes to travel down. There are dozens of scales and hundreds (if not thousands) of worthy trains that you could recreate. Historically, however, it hasn’t been economically viable for a company to meet all those needs. If this sounds like the kind of situation that would benefit from rapid fabrication, Thorpe is way ahead of you.
Flexiscale (a “tiny division” of design consultancy Jaggeree, which Thorpe runs with partner Becky Fishman) is a platform for exploring the possibilities of creating highly accurate, highly specialized model train kits. Using laser scanners, they can accurately document real-life locomotives and rail cars. Using CAD software and 3-D printers they can print the parts as kits at a variety of scales.
“I’m a model maker and I want some specific models of specific things,” says Thorpe. “Others will want different things and this is a way of building a platform we can all share.” With so many possible trains to scan, Flexiscale works on a crowdsourcing model. Anyone can propose a project. “When the proposal gets some traction we then explore if it can be done, talk to the relevant people who have the real thing and if they agree to us scanning it we create a Kickstarter project.”
Their first project is a proposal to create laser-scanned 3-D printed kits of the Ffestiniog Englands. (The what? The Ffestiniog Englands are the world’s oldest working narrow-gauge engines. They run on the Ffestiniog Railway, the world’s oldest independent railroad, and a major Welsh tourist attraction.)
It’s the 150th anniversary of the opening of the line, and for the first time since 1946, the four remaining locomotives are going to be in the same place. It’s a perfect opportunity to subject them to some digital documentation. “The four locomotives, Prince, Princess, Palmerston and Welsh Pony, are fascinating,” says Thorpe. “None of them are exactly as built, and over the years their designs have subtly diverged so none is the same as their classmates, and certainly none of them are like their original plans.”
Once the trains have been scanned, it’s a matter of cleaning them up in a CAD program and then working out how to break them down into kits. Although they could theoretically be printed as a single model, half the fun of model railroading is building the models yourself. So Flexiscale finds a balance between challenge and frustration. The kits can also be resized depending on the scale that buyers want. “What we’re finding is that there are lots of obscure scales around where people currently have no kits and so these are being really popular,” says Thorpe.
Splitting the model into parts also makes it easier to people to paint fiddly bits, and allows them to use different materials depending on the detail. “For small details we can use a resin-type material for larger parts of superstructure we can use the lower-price and slightly tougher white plastic,” says Thorpe. “In some cases we’ll create brass parts and will also have some etched parts.”
Thorpe says that beyond the personal joy at getting scale models of the trains he’s interested in, he hopes that Flexiscale will help make 3-D printing more understandable to the general public.
“Although many see 3-D printing as the thing which opens the flood gates for personalized/customized things it also opens up the ability to perform manufacture on a mini and a micro scale,” says Thorpe, “Tens or hundreds of things rather than thousands. This makes it perfect for niche things like my hobby, model railways.”
All photos: Courtesy Flexiscale