A diorama by Roy Allen, Peter Fulgoney, Rob Kernaghan, Mike McCabe and Jim Smith with photographs by Jim Baumann

The idea to build a combined diorama came from quite a number of emails that bounced around a few months back, a few of us wanted to try out the idea of putting together a number of models to create a larger scene.  Largely to take advantage of some excellent merchant kits which had recently become available from Battlefleet models, and to give the impetus to build some of those rarely seen kits that were lying around in the stash, we hit on the idea of representing an Atlantic convoy complete with escorts.

Les Brown, the co-ordinator of the Small Warship Special Interest Group of IPMS kindly offered some space on his stand for the IPMS Nationals in November 2007, so the plan started to be formulated of how we could fit models from five modellers into a 4 x 2 foot space and create the impression of a convoy.  We decided that as the ships would all be underway, and also we all wanted to be able to fit them firmly to bases and be individual models after the convoy was completed, we would need a constant size of base to allow all the models to be fitted together like a jigsaw with some blank sea bases in between to give an element of separation.  All bases would be on a standard size of 25 x 10 cm, with 30 x 10 for the larger tankers, all with a constant 1cm height of base, though in the end this didn’t quite work out as planned.  Also we were going to use my model of the C2 freighter Sea Witch, which was already complete, as the basis for the colour of sea.  I supplied a colour swatch to everyone but again this didn’t quite go according to plan.  With hindsight there are easier ways to do this but part of the project was to see if this kind of joint build would work and other than a few errors we can learn from, I think we all agreed that it did.

In total there were three tankers, eight freighters, three escorts and one Catapult Armed Merchant (CAM) ship, and two aircraft.  The complete convoy diorama had a lot of interest from those attending the Telford show it was particularly nice to talk to one gentleman who had sailed on one of the Fort class ships like the type I had built, and pleasing for him to tell me that I had the cargo booms correctly positioned for when the ship was at sea.

So there you have it, an interesting change of pace from the usual grey warships and nice that on the second day of the event, Remembrance Sunday November 11th, there was a small corner of the event that paid tribute to the merchant seamen who lost their lives in the Battle of the Atlantic.
 

ModelWarships.com -- -- Telford, 2007