Terrain- Cold War Germany (Redux)

In addition to working on the generic landscape pieces, I also resumed the search for some suitable pieces of 80’s looking terrain, to populate 20mm Cold War games with. 

Once again turning to the model railway sector, I headed over to New Modellers Shop, an absolute treasure-trove I stumbled upon a while back for all sorts of terrain-building japes. Here, I hit upon some items from Dapol which looked like they might do the trick…

The modern girder bridge and signal gantry I’d already come across and earmarked for purchase; the girder bridge will be easily converted from rail to road, and by the removal of signal lights replacing them with suitable German route confirmation boards, the signal gantry will become a nice overhead sign for….

Yes. This has been playing more or less on loop since I began thinking about this. The neighbours will grow to love it when I start construction on said Autobahn…

Away from the open road, I found some items that I hadn’t previously thought suitable, but thinking about it, the shop and flat, when combined with the German signs obtained a few months ago should look OK (considering buying a second one to be the airfield NAAFI shop for RAF Ost- Totenbraut…), while the British styled bungalow would make an ideal guardhouse for the airfield with some appropriate signage and tarting up.

I’ve got plans forming for a sort of non-descript, generic industrial area, consisting of a gas-holder, tall chimney,  lots of gantries/ huts, etc, and thought that the water tower could look suitably industrial with the right paint scheme, and the signal box could pull duty as a sort of control room/ ops centre for the complex, again with the appropriate signage added.

Just as I was about to pay for the items I noticed that there were some other manufacturers listed, and decided to have a look at the Knightwing section, since they’d already supplied me with some very nice security fencing, and found the piece d’ resistance; the checkpoint with barrier. This would make an ideal gatehouse for RAF Ost-Totenbraut (especially when accompanied by a suitable gate guardian…), so in the cart it went.

The beauty of these items is they usually cost bright washers compared to purpose built wargames scenery, and lend themselves to almost infinite customisation. Once this stuff starts to go together, it should provide a pretty decent looking board, which should hopefully capture some of the character of Germany in the 1980s...

Cheers

Iain