Chestnut Horses - HO Scale

Chestnuts on a pasture by the line

A horse is a rewarding animal on a layout, because its silhouette reads even from a distance. This set offers six of them and they all have the same coloring: chestnut, that is a brown coat with a brown mane and tail and no black areas. Uniform coloring is not a loss but an advantage. The herd looks like a herd from one stud and the eye does not jump from animal to animal.

Four of the animals are adult, two are foals. Their postures differ: some have their heads lowered to the ground and are grazing, others stand upright, as if something in the distance had caught their attention. It is exactly this difference that makes it possible to build a scene that makes sense. A foal keeps close to a grazing mare, a standing animal watches the direction a sound is coming from. Anyone who puts all the animals in the same posture gets an ornament; anyone who arranges them according to behavior gets a scene.

The size follows from a reduction of 1:87, in which an adult horse measures just under two centimeters at the withers and a foal noticeably less. The animals come painted and ready to be set in place, so the work lies only in choosing a spot and gluing them down. On a pasture it pays to sink the hooves gently into the growth, so that the animal does not stand on the grass but in it.

Besides a pasture the set comes into its own at a farm, beside a corral, at a watering place or in the role of draft power on a field track. It also works well as a counterweight to a technical scene: a couple of horses behind a fence next to a transshipment point is a reminder that the line runs through countryside. When building a fence it is worth leaving it pliantly irregular, because a straight line of posts looks manufactured at first glance, whereas a slightly wavering row looks like the work of a farmer. And one more small thing: horses gather in the shade in hot weather, so a group under a tree makes more sense than an even spread over the whole area.