Here are a few pics of a model/diorama I built over 8 years ago. It’s the largest completed model I have at this moment and it therefore travels little and hasn’t seen daylight for over 6 years. Today, I decided to open up the box and see how things were!
This diorama is based upon a picture taken from an areoplane of the Girardot seaplane base of Colombian airline SCADTA. I really wanted to build that base, but scale was a problem, so I settled for just a litte part. Going up the ramp, the aircraft would enter a rather large hangar which I just could not include…
Colombian airline SCADTA was founded by German immigrants in 1919 and started the first scheduled services of the Americas on 19 September 1921 between Barranquila, on the Atlantic coast, and Girardot, 650 miles inland on the river Magdalena.
The Junkers F13 was the mainstay of the airline from its debut until the '30s; some were still in service in 1940, when, in order to hide its Germanic origins, the airline’s name became AVIANCA.
‘Colombia’, portrayed here, was SCADTA’s first aircraft. It was lost in 1923. AVIANCA is today the second oldest surviving airline in the world, after the Dutch KLM…
The kit is Revell’s 1/72 Junkers F13, basically built out of the box (I did add a few bits & bobs inside the open air cockpit). The kit is spendid, and builds up beautifuly. The decals are rub on transfers, first applied onto blank decal sheet.
The base is built of expanded polystyrene, plastic card and paris plaster. The tree, a huge one, is made of Milliput over a metal wire frame. For transport purposes, the top of the tree is removable (!). Blue-tack is used to get the two parts together, and the joint is well hidden under the wide canopy of the tree.
The figures are a mix of various manufacturers, mostly from the local train hobby shop I think. The truck is a resin kit by now defunct Transport Models. The quality of the resin was rather bad and I ended up scratching a lot of it!