It’s supposed to be every boy’s dream to grow up and work on the trains – for Sand In Your Eye’s professional sand sculptors Richard Spence and Jamie Wardley, that dream came true when they were asked to come down to Great Yarmouth station and create a sand sculpture replica of one of the new trains Greater Anglia are introducing across their network.
They brought with them a custom made modular platform for the whole installation (which was then dressed with branded panels) and a pre made sand sculpture of Greater Anglia‘s mascot, the hare, which would sit alongside the bigger sand carving. Our pre carves can save a lot of time if there are multiple elements to a sand sculpting job, it also means that there is something for onlookers to look at whilst the live carve is taking place. Some clients even prefer to just use pre carved sand sculptures as all the mess is made in our studio in Yorkshire and we can deliver and install them with minimum fuss and disruption.
Professional and amateur sand sculptors may be extra impressed by the hare’s ears – usually a delicate, overhanging structure like this in a sand sculpture would be a bit too ambitious and liable to crumble and collapse, but because our pre carved sculptures become more solid as they dry out, we were able to excavate away at the support midway through and they stayed up!
The boys were there for three days in total, which included getting the sand delivered onto the sculpture site very early in the morning so they could compact it on the first day, without disturbing the commuters and day to day running of the station and then two long days sculpting the dynamic forced perspective model of the new, state of the art trains. Thankfully, the staff at Great Yarmouth station were very understanding and stayed beyond the normal operating hours of the station, which allowed us to make the sculpture so quickly. Despite these long hours, Rich and Jamie did manage to find time to go for a swim after work! When you’re by the seaside…
It’s not the first train sand sculpture we’ve ever made, the year before saw the Sand In Your Eye team carving a Virgin Pendolino train on Blackpool beach, but this one had almost all the features that the fantastic new range of trains do even down to the door handles and couplings!
Special thanks go to the staff at Great Yarmouth station, and Jason, Alan and Juliet from Greater Anglia.
