Spotted on Steve Warrington’s Back2Bay6 stand at Leeds last weekend [March 2007 - EH] were a new (I think) range of brick and tile products.

These are a kind of half relief bricks One glance was enough, I had to give them a try. More on the tiles at a later time, but for now I’m concentrating on the bricks. These are designed for the 1/24th dollshouse market, individual bricks for cladding the walls.

They are made of a clay material, a bit like terracotta, but not as hard - maybe they just haven’t been fired. A clever design feature is that they taper out a little toward the base on two sides, giving automatic spacing for the mortar. Building a wall from these would have been easy but - being me - I thought I saw other uses for them.

Seeing as these are not fully 3D bricks, rather like tiles, they are quite thin, a little under 2mm thick. It struck me they looked a similar thickness to the height of code 100 rail, you can probably guess where this is heading. Yup, ideal for inlaid track. Straightforward enough? Not quite, but more on that in a minute. Here are a few pics before you get too bored with my writings. A nice simple brick laid walkway across the tracks was used as a test piece. Here it is in place on a length of Peco Setrack, it works fine with the 0-16.5/On30 track as well.

This second pic shows one of my wagon underframes fitted with Bachmann wheels, which have larger flanges than those I normally use, as I wanted to make sure the clearances were ok. It rolls through here fine.

I used what are described as “Weathered” bricks, I thought they would work better on the ground than the ordinary type. This overhead shot shows the variety, the edges are deliberately uneven, honest

And a second overhead with the wagon underframe on it. The clearance is quite tight, but I dont think would cause any problem on straight track, I’m not sure I would want to try this on a curve, but these things are so easy to work it should be possible if you have the patience.

Now, you’d think this would have been a fairly simple task. It would have been … had I taken the sensible option and soldered rails to copperclad for the track. But no, I had to accept the challenge of using ready made track. The problems all came from the rail fixings as they do tend to get in the way if you want to put anything close to the rails.

The solution once worked out was simple enough: mounting the bricks onto card slightly inset from the edges then using a file to put a taper on the underside of the bricks was enough to clear the rail fixings. It should be noted that the soft nature of the bricks makes them easy to work with a file, note how clogged up the file at the right of the picture below is. Hopefully this shows what is required to use them with ready made track.

The brick slips, come in packs of 150 for £2.60. This should give a coverage of 11.5 square inches so it will be obvious that to do a complete building will be quite expensive, but to use in smaller areas as I have, the cost is not going to amount to much and I think this will be where they are most useful.

There is a grout/mortar which comes in powder form, it is a kind of buff sandy colour and the makers recommend sealing the bricks before grouting, with a matt varnish, to avoid staining.

Creating patterns such as a herringbone is very easy with these as long as you glue the bricks down as you go (they tend to move about otherwise). Bricks appear to take paints and stains very readily, I have tried a thin wash of black poster paint on a couple and the effect is very good. A few with washes of burnt umber or sienna should give a nice bit of variety. Wetting a brick first, then adding a touch of black poster paint, does give a very good representation of a burnt or overfired brick, still experimenting here.

The face of the bricks measure 9mm by 4.5mm nominally and as mentioned previously, the depth is a little under 2mm. The self spacing feature, which runs along one long side and one end of each brick, adds approx 0.5mm to the dimensions, leaving a 0.5mm space and approximately the same depth for the mortar. These proportions aren’t accurate for brickwork in UK walls (as Christopher Payne pointed out in the original thread) but do work well for paving.

[This tip originally appeared in the GnATTERbox]