Something Different: Americana's Gettysburg Playset - Pt 2 54mm Blue & Gray Skirmish - Fleshing Out The Scene

I'm not saying I'm slow or anything, but ummmm, yeah, okay, I'm slow! Six years ago I was hot and heavy into reviewing American Civil War (ACW) toys, but didn't really do anything else with them except for building a small diorama (since disposed of). The thing was heavy, having been built on the discarded end of a shipping crate! I do want to re-make this thing in a much lighter format.

Here we are six years later and I'm now finally doing the kind of set-ups I wanted to do then. Why the delay? At the time -2014 - the space today's display is set up on was home to my Marxville and Plateau train layout. One year later - in 2015 - that layout got dismantled, freeing up space for other things. But from 2015 until now 'other things' meant everything else but ACW. So anywho, here we are. Using Americana's Gettysburg playset as a basis (see yesterday's post) I pulled out one of my tote bins of ACW toys (I have about three bins - the one I used for this display was actually the handiest one to get to). The bin had TSSD, Armies in Plastic, Accurate, Imex, and Timpo figures. Another tote had Marx tress and rock walls and Timmee crop rows. Putting them all together resulted in this 'selectively compressed' Gettuysburg battlefield with some its more famous push points represented: Lee's HQ, Meade's HQ, Little Round Top, Devil's Den, Cemetary Hill, the Wheatfield, the road of course is not the Sunken Road as that was during the Battle of Antietam, but Gettysburg was a town with plenty of roads crisscrossing the countryside. A couple of things thing I noticed about my own collection: I don't have any cavalry other than some Marx pieces (in another bin) and I had sold most of my wagons because they were of the smallish type found in old BMC and Hingfat header bag sets. I'll be putting this stuff away again in preparation for another set-up, so stay tuned to this station boys and girls for another thrilling adventure of in The Cave LOL Enjoy! Opa Fritz

Something Different: Americana's Gettysburg Playset - Pt 1 54mm Blue & Gray Skirmish

I got the urge to break out some of my Little Green Army Men (or in this case, the Blue & Gray). The Halloween train layout has been dismantled and I started putting down track for another temporary set-up but then thought, hey, why don't I play with some of my other toys instead? - at least for a little while. Soooo, I broke out the Americana Souvenir and Gifts (the immediate successor to BMC, prior to BMC regaining its foothold) Gettysburg playset. I had covered the playset before back in 2014, but that was basically a photo essay of the set contents. This time I wanted to see it set-up in a play environment. So here's what it looked like. The space is about 44" (1.11m) x 70" (1.78m) which isn't that big, but it still dwarfed the 64 figures in the set. In this set-up the field looks empty, as if this were a minor skirmish between a couple of scouting parties. Tomorrow we'll have a look at a proper battleground - or at least as proper as can be had in 40"x70".   Enjoy! Opa Fritz

A very selectively compressed version of Little Round Top perhaps?

Good vantage point for artillery