Falcon - Morning Arrival 1000 Piece Jigsaw Puzzle

A green tank engine easing into a country station on a bright morning, and everyone on the platform has already turned to look at it. A Dominic Davison painting for Falcon de luxe, and it is a station scene rather than a train portrait, which is the better of the two kinds.

What you are looking at

The engine comes in from the right on the near track, green with brass and copper trim and a crest on the tank side, pulling maroon and cream carriages behind it. On the platform, a porter in uniform and cap standing with a dog at heel. Further along, a couple with a baby, one of them pointing the engine out to the child. Leather trunks and cases stacked ready, a wooden bench, a red bicycle leaning on a white picket fence.

The buildings are where the detail is. A stone station building with a slate roof and a canopy, and beside it a signal box in dusty blue timber with a wall of windows, a clock and an external wooden staircase up to the door. A semaphore signal on the platform, a cast iron lamp, a platform 2 sign. Behind all of it, a red-leaved acer on the left and open green country running away to the horizon.

What it is like to build

Start with the rails and the platform edge. Two long parallel lines of polished steel and a white painted platform lip, all running the full width of the picture. They are the strongest straight lines in it and they cut the bottom third off cleanly.

Then the signal box, because it is the largest single block of one colour. That dusty blue is used nowhere else in the image, and the white window frames break it into a grid you can work along.

The engine is quicker than it looks. The boiler is a smooth dark cylinder with a bright brass band along the top and a hard highlight down one side, so it assembles almost in a line. The genuinely hard region is the sky and the tree canopy at top left, where a lot of soft-edged foliage sits against pale blue with no structure. Leave it, and sort it by how much red is in the leaf.

Why Falcon

Falcon de luxe is Jumbo's range for exactly this kind of traditional scene, and the brand is built around its artists rather than its formats. Dominic Davison is the one it is best known for. What he does that most painters of this subject do not is light: there is a single low morning sun in this picture and every shadow in it agrees with every other, which is why the platform reads as a real place rather than a collection of props.

Specifications

A little context

Railway nostalgia splits into two quite different puzzles and it is worth knowing which one you are buying. A locomotive portrait is a study of one machine, largely smooth metal, and it is the harder and more repetitive build. A station scene like this one is a picture full of separate small objects, which makes it easier and considerably more sociable. The other one we have in that second style is Lazy Days by Steam.

Stock is real and it is in Sydney. Free shipping Australia wide over $150, and free same-day delivery inside 6 km of North Bondi with no minimum.

Built it already? Use the Questions section below and tell us how you found it. Which part fought you, how long it took, and whether you would send someone else to it. We answer every one.