About

Hi and welcome to this blog! My name is Andrés. I'm mostly known as Mid Sodor Railway 2003, this blog is dedicated to my mini series Great Southwest Railway Adventures.

I grew up watching Thomas & Friends since I was 3 years old, I always loved the railways and locomotives, they always fascinated me. From a very young age, I started to play with cars thinking that they were trains, also I imagined unique situations to envolve the characters.

Years passed, but my fascination for the railways didn't passed. My life now is troublesome because I live in Venezuela, the economic situation isn't good right now, I don't have any special materials to film this series, so I'm filming these stories with with the least things I can get and with a low quality camera, the only way I could forget the situation was centering my mind doing something else. Then I remembered that I could bring to life all the stories I had in mind. I started to develop the characters, the sets and the main plot.

I've got inspiration from Thomas & Friends books and the TV Series, and from the real railways, how they work and the locomotives. Since I was young I had a red locomotive toy, so that toy became one of the protagonist of the series.

Scratch-Built Locomotives:

The locomotives are made of card-stock, they run on a 16mm track, and they are non-motorized, they are pulled with a 0,25mm fishing line, they are painted with crayons and markers. The chassis are little cars that came with a promo by Kellogs many years ago, the engines bodies are built according to their chassis, the first models were built with less materials, now the models are more detailed including things that the previous versions didn't have. Name and number plates are lettered by hand, then cut to either glue for optional designs.

Scenery and Structures:

I've got inspiration from the classic TV series, the sets constructed are temporary, Some structures are made by me, with card-stock or box carboard, like the viaduct or tunnel portals, but most the buldings like houses are from my christmas crib, then everything is put on place for filming.

This gives me freedom to change the layout in anyway I wish. If I need to I can reconstruct the set again in different variations. I sometimes don't have the space or provision to build and store "complete" model railway sets or a huge house layout, so sometimes I have to reconstruct the sets on the room's floor, but actually is a benefit to me to work this way
For the ground, cloths of many colors are used, mostly the green cloth is used for the hills and ground. Some time textured paper is used for rocky grounds like quarry terrain or mountains.

A continuous backdrop is placed on the ground to simulate distant hills, also blue cloth is used for the sky backdrop. In some cases, the sky is edited by computer and other times, a specific cloth color is used, by example, if I want a sunset or dawn sky I use an orange cloth in perspective of the camera, it means that the cloth is used in a way that only the cloth is seen inside the filming frame.