Story Notes: The Layout · 4:52am Nov 28th, 2023
My contribution to Ponyville CiderFest's Scattered Pages: Tales from the Book of All Stories. More stories from PVCF's 2023 Interactive Storytelling Experience can be found here.
I actually built a small layout specifically for this story, which is seen in the cover image. Starting with the above, the raw materials.
You can’t build a city without rock and roll a good solid foundation, and this is where our grass mats, sand mats, and snow blanket come in.
The green grass mat is great for a vibrant community, while the yellower grass is more in lines with an industrial zone, like is depicted in the cover art of the story. This is the base of this particular diorama.
There’s a pair of sandy mats, perfect for a beach or desert.
Lastly the snow blanket, found among the Christmas supplies at a hobby store, but makes a great base for an alpine environment such as Snowcatcher’s.
This is the road tape mentioned. Each roll is 15 feet of straight, two-lane road. Great for making city grids and highways, but not much else. Curves are sold separately.
Can’t have a city without buildings! These are all scaled at 1/87 (HO), while the cars are 1/64 (S). Cars will look a little big compared to the buildings, but they’ll take up less space, and the buildings are the backdrop, regardless of whether the diorama is meant to showcase cars or trains.
Also, one of these is Blue Horse Hotel. Snowcatcher is a blue unicorn who runs a hotel. There was no way I was leaving that behind.
Some people. Again, found these at a hobby store, they’re actually fairly scale accurate for 1/64. The boater actually fits inside the Buick convertible in the cover art (zoom in and you can see him sitting perfectly in the passenger seat).
Of course, Snowy’s layout is all about the cars. Matchbox is her gateway drug… but Snowy’s explored the higher end of the hobby too.
Above we see a selection of currently available Matchbox cars, including both the 1980 AMC Eagle (below) and 1986 Volvo 240 mentioned in story.
Hot Wheels is the other common brand, available everywhere from Target to drugstores.
Their biggest brush realism was arguably in the 1980s. They still had crazy fantasy cars, but the spectraflame colors and redline wheels were gone. The cars were well-proportioned, not hot rodded (like the Dodge Omni 024 seen below). The Redline Club Porsche 959 is included to show what Hot Wheels can do when they put effort in…
…and charge $25 to $30 a car. 
Auto World & Johnny Lightning are both brands from the same company (Round 2). Auto World castings are true 1/64 offerings. Notice they’ve got a Dodge Caravan minivan from the 1980s.
The Lincoln Continental Mark V is one of the longest ever production cars, and at true 1/64 scale this car is massive (compare to the minivan, silver Toyota Supra, and the yellow & white Ford Ranger which are also all true scale).
M2 Machines has a range of 1950s cars like DeSotos with opening hoods and doors. They’ve also got a range of project cars, like the blue Dodge Charger seen below.
Tomica is Japan’s homegrown diecast brand. Even their basic cars are nicer than the basic Matchbox and Hot Wheels cars. Long ago, the basic Matchboxes and Hot Wheels cars had opening features and in the case of Matchbox, bouncy suspensions. Tomica never stopped making their cars, but they kept raising the price of their cars instead of sticking to the dollar price point. Matchbox could look like this if Mattel had been willing to increase the price past a dollar twenty years ago.
Meanwhile, Majorette is France’s homegrown brand. As you can see, like Tomica, these still have their opening features. Jada currently offers some Majorettes here in the USA under the Pink Slips brand, like the purple Mercedes-Benz G-Wagon shown.
GreenLight is my favorite brand these days. They make a wide range of cars that hit the sweet spot between price and quality. The NYPD Dodge Monaco is seen in the story as a Plymouth Fury (from the side, these cars are identical – the only difference between the Monaco and Fury are the grill and taillights). GreenLight has also done the Fury in NYPD colors, and the real life force used more Plymouths than Dodges.
GreenLight Mustang II. Actually, this is the German T5 (the ‘Mustang’ trademark was already in use in Germany so Ford sold the car there as the T5 until ~1980).
Lastly, Road Signature. These are difficult to find now as the company has gone out of business, but they made some gems!
Ignore G1 Pinwheel’s hair in that shot. 
G1 Seashell pops up in the background too.
At first, I thought the magic paper was something that could "transmit" somewhere else, and the pony with the other end of it was like "sure, let's prank Snowy by shopping for her."
Thanks for writing!
5756959
You're welcome!
5756945
That would've been really amusing!