For the past 18 months or so I’ve been picking up scenery items from local model shop from the expanding range of scenery produced by Javis (who are best known for their railway scenery items). It occurred to me that railway scenic items aren’t used so much in wargaming these days and so some may not have come across these very useful items.
The range consists of lightweight foam models, pre-painted and flocked, and basically ready to drop straight onto the table. There are items such as rough ground with large rocks showing, ruined temples, ruined houses and barns as well as more obviously military items such as gun positions and trenches. The scale for the buildings and trenches seems best suited to 25mm figures, they are a bit big for 1/72nd scale plastic figures, but don’t look too bad. The natural terrain items could be used with any scale from 15mm up.
Probably the best way to describe them it that all the items have a very “Warhammer” look about them – quite a bright green grass effect flock has been used, there are lots of pointy rocks in shades of grey. The buildings have been painted in fairly muted colours, it looks like a black undercoat with a dark grey dusted over it. The static grass material has been allowed to creep up the side of some of the buildings. This gives a good representation of a burnt out and abandoned building. I personally feel that they are very attractive scenery pieces, and very useful for either skirmishes, or games such as DBA where just a few very nice looking pieces of terrain are needed. They are also light, and seem to be reasonably tolerant to handling (although I haven’t tried dropping or treading on them!)
The prices are quite reasonable for something that can literally be taken home from the shop, put on the table and looks good without any work. The burnt out barn was £11, for a terrain piece which measures 250mm x 140mm on an L shaped base. I also have the small ruined temple (4 of these would make an excellent large temple), the ruined hut, the large ruined house, the spikey stone terrain and the medium stone mound. These ranged in price from about £5 to £10 as far as I can recall. With many of the newer metal 25mm figures ranging from £1-£2 each for a foot figure, £10 is not a lot of money for good looking terrain.
Javis have a web site – www.javis.co.uk – where all the items can be viewed, although they only offer retail trade. Have a look – and then encourage your local model / model railway shop to order a few items in.
Back to Table of Contents -- Lone Warrior # 146
Back to Lone Warrior List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Magazine List
© Copyright 2004 by Solo Wargamers Association.
This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com