Most of us treat a layout as something to protect: clean track, careful running, nothing ever leaves the rails. The maker behind Scale Wrecks does the opposite, staging deliberate collisions between HO scale trains and diecast vehicles and filming the results at 1000 frames per second. The whole compilation runs past the ten minute mark, and it was shot on an outdoor miniature diorama rather than a shelf layout in a basement.
The build itself is a large scale model railway track embedded in sand and gravel, set on sandy, rocky ground. The toy vehicles get launched across the sand with a mechanical propulsion method to meet the moving trains. The maker has said the whole thing was fun to set up and film, and that comes through in how much terrain got dressed.
The details give it plenty of character: a red and silver Santa Fe diesel carrying road number 5075, a green building labeled VALLEY LUMBER CO, a general store and a water tower. The crashes send vehicles flipping over the tracks and into miniature obstacles like log piles and a campfire.
One open item is the crash physics. The maker has noted the physics are not correct and still needs to work out how to make the cars crumble properly. There is also a price to pay for this kind of filming: the Burlington Northern GP40 was damaged by sand and iron in the wheels, the one casualty so far.
Project by Scale Wrecks. Watch it on their YouTube channel: