Walls Come Crumbling Down

I'd hate to think I was responsible for giving any readers a shock, so be warned, this post is all about some actual layout progress. Or, perhaps more accurately, some layout renovation. Even so it's quite unusual for this blog.

Himself has been doing some titivation of Dduallt ahead of its appearance at Railex next month. Many of the stone walls have had to be replaced.

The originals were made 20 years ago, in a characteristically labour-intensive fashion, using Pyruma fire cement. We rolled hundreds of tiny wee balls of the stuff between our fingers and then formed them into long strings which represented dry stone walls quite effectively.

They lasted well up until the last couple of years when the layout spent a period stored in an unheated industrial unit and was exposed to severe temperature variations between summer and winter, at which point the chemical structure within the ancient fire cement cried 'enough!' and this was the result...




Some rather crumbly walls...



Some which had not collapsed so much have been treated with superglue and are holding together for now, but the worst examples have been replaced with plaster wall sections from Ten Commandments, a product which had it been on the market back in the early 1990's we would have jumped at using, as indeed we are on Bron Hebog.

Here you can see the replacement sections grafted into place. The next step will be to paint and weather them to match the existing walls.



As you can see Himself has been doing the work under a track possession which explains why the sheep are being allowed to wander along the line...