I've recently been making my own 4mm scale posters, posterboards and adverts for the main station building at Farthing.
Posters
Most of the posters were selected from the various Edwardian GWR posters illustrated in an earlier entry. I chose a variety of posters to represent the 1900-1914 period as a whole. This does lead to anachronisms, but I wanted the posters to capture the GWR’s “Great awakening” in Edwardian days when the system and services improved significantly.
Apart from the posters found online, I also had a go at extracting posters from period publications and images. For example, the two above were cropped from the GWR Magazine (August 1911), edited to delete the gentleman and coloured with an online image colouriser. The colours are probably not correct, but prove me wrong - these do not to my knowledge exist anymore.
When extracting posters from images, the “Perspective Correction” tool in Paintshop Pro (and similar software) came in handy. I used it to straighten this poster, then crop and colour it with the “colour replacer” tool.
My station building is based on Edwardian Newbury. The posters are mostly illegible in period photos, but a few can be made out - including an advertisement of the Fishguard route to Ireland ca. 1910. I found an online copy of the same poster but for the opposite direction, so reworked the lettering to match the Newbury version. I forgot to change the G.M. though!
Making posters from scratch proved harder. Another poster seen at Newbury was the “diagonal GWR” design, variants of which appear at several stations in Edwardian photos (above are two variants at Dawlish Warren). I made one from scratch in Paintshop Pro, but struggled to find a matching font. So this one is “in the spirit of”.
Edwardian photos of (left to right) Abdingdon, Newbury and Lambourn stations show a particular poster advertising GWR services to Newbury Racecourse. The posters are too blurred to use directly...
...so I combined various elements from other period posters. That approach also ensures that the fonts are right for the period.
I drew up some chalkboards in Word. I wanted them to look handwritten but may have overdone it! Anyway, the staff at Farthing always made sure to announce delays on other railways 😊
The posters were pasted into a Word document, reduced to approximate scale and printed on ordinary paper on a good quality printer.
Posterboards
I then made a variety of posterboards, based on my prior little survey of these. The boards were drawn up in Inkscape. I didn’t have any prototype dimensions, so used period posters to indicate approximate size.
The boards were cut on my Silhouette printer.
The layers were laminated with Limonene. I used 5 thou styrene for both the outer frames and backing. In retrospect 10 thou for the backing might have been a safer bet against warping over time.
The boards were then spray-painted. The “Great Western” lettering was cropped from a photo of a poster board on the SVR, edited and reduced to fit, then printed on paper and mounted with matt varnish.
The posters, likewise, were mounted with undiluted Vallejo matt varnish: A first coat to saturate the backing, then another coat followed by the poster, and then two further coats. The cocktail stick helps make sure the edges are stuck down.
I used weathering powder to tone down some posters, though care was needed – this is too much.
Cutting and fitting the posters took time but was satisfying.
I ended up with 39 poster boards and 56 posters for the main building. Another 20 boards were prepared for the rest of the station. Some posters are duplicates, as seen in some prototype photos.
Non-railway advertisements
Next I made some enamel ads. In the past I have used ready-made ones, but they only give you one of each, and they decide the size. So I found a variety of ads online and checked that the brands were around in Edwardian days. I then imported the images into Word and resized them to suit.
The ads were printed on a good printer and stuck to 5 thou styrene.
I gave them two coats of varnish, satin then matt to create a very slight sheen. The edges were darkened with a marker (using the side of the tip, from the back). This makes them look thinner. A single swipe with a sanding pad rounded the corners – again easily overdone.
As discussed in the previous entry, some companies had multiple identical ads along the side and ends of a station. Stephens’ Inks favoured this approach. These were toned down lightly with a wash.
Enamel ads tend to dominate in Edwardian photos of GWR stations, but occasional poster ads can be seen. So I also made a few of those.
Finally it was time to fit the posters and adverts. In Edwardian days they were usually mounted on wooden battens (see previous post). I made these from styrene strips. At Newbury the posters on the side walls had their own battens - hidden behind the boards – with separate, more exposed battens for enamel adverts.
At the ends, long poster boards were fitted, with battens extending upwards for the ads.
Edwardian photos of Newbury show posters all along the access side, wherever there was room, in prime position at eye-level height.
Many posters and ads at Newbury are too blurry in photos to identify exactly. So the choice was up to me. These are still only mounted with bluetack as I feel they clash a bit. Not that the real GWR would have cared much.
Mazawattee Tea was another fan of multiple adverts, sometimes right next to each other. I have compromised here: On the station’s access side there should be some 60 short battens below the windows, most of them unused. But I just couldn’t face it.
Platform side. Would a London & Birmingham “new route” poster have been seen on the Berks & Hants Extension? Intuitively not, but on the other hand photos show posters in unexpected locations, and as a mainline station Farthing would have been a good general advertising spot.
The posterboards contribute to the “chocolate-and-sandstone” colour scheme that characterized Edwardian Newbury - and Farthing. The powders on the doors are just experiments, to be washed off!
GWR posters at eye-height with non-railway ads above and below, as per Edwardian rule of thumb. The leaning chalkboards can occasionally be seen in prototype photos.
At Newbury, this end of the building can’t be seen in photos as it was a covered exit. At Farthing it will be exposed and facing the access road, so I went to town with the ads.
The other end is more exposed in Edwardian photos of Newbury, including a few shots where specific signs and posters can be identified. This allowed me to replicate some of them, i.e. Burgoyne’s and Maple & Co, and the GWR posters on the left.