Master Of Disguise

Efforts to continue fettling the board joints have been thwarted by the freak heatwave on the Costa del Clyde this week.

To make sure that everything's correct at the Porthmadog end Himself ideally needs to erect the whole layout, but the garage is not big enough.

He reckons it might be possible by poking the southern end out beyond the garage doors but the heat has been so intense that were he to try doing so we'd probably end up with buckled rails, just like those which have been stopping the full sized trains running at times this week.

So instead he's been getting on with another little task, to try and disguise the board joint which runs the length of the layout and across the fields above the station.

One way of doing this is with a strategically placed wall.

For our stone walls we use the plaster castings by Ten Commandments, and the one here is in the condition them come in the packet before they are painted.

We're also having to do some spot re-turfing after a little bit of damagae was sustained dismantling the layout at Bressingham last month.

Farmyard Scenes

There have been more little details added to the farmyard along with the (scale) miles of fencing going on the layout.

Some etched brass gates have been added around the place.

Himself as also cut, fitted and painted the resin breeze block wall I cast for him.

The whole area's still far too tidy, though, but it's getting there.

Breezy Does It

While Himself was busy inserting fence posts around the farm scene on the layout he took another look at our research photos and discovered that there were some walls missing.

Not your iconic Welsh dry stone walls, but walls built out of what you and I would probably call breeze blocks.

So he asked if I could knock some up by scribing into styrene?

Seeing how he was only needing around a foot of wall, in total, I agreed.

When I sat down to do it between Christmas and New Year, though, I realised I'd forgotten just how boring it can be.

By the time I'd scratched out six inch's worth I decided I couldn't face doing it another three times - because you have to do it on the back as well - and it occurred to me that there was no good reason why I shouldn't short circuit the process by using this first piece as a master and casting the rest.

Thanks to my inherent laziness I was able to leave the silicon rubber to set overnight and then the next morning, in the space of 2 hours, cast four sections which he can now use to make the 1 foot section of wall required.

So now I'm freed up to move onto the next project.

The bad news is that it also involves a lot of scribing into styrene and this time there will be no resin rescue option.

Layout Recycling

Himself is making final preparations for showing Bron Hebog at Sparsholt next weekend.

There comes a point where you've got to stop building and start making the layout actually work, which is where he is at right now.

The issue with the layout at the moment is that at both ends the track finishes in the middle of nowhere - there are no fiddle yards.

So Himself has done the logical thing and borrowed one from Dduallt.



As luck would have it the track alignment for the lower (Porthmadog end) yard from Dduallt is a perfect match with the current head of steel at the upper (Rhyd Ddu) end of Bron Hebog.

(If you click on the photo to enlarge it you may just be able to make out Baldwin tractor 'Moelwyn' performing test running duties.)

This will give us a lot more flexibility and the chance to have a more train formations on the go at Sparsholt, although because Dduallt is a much more modest sized layout the sets will have to be a little shorter than we intend to run when Bron Hebog is finished.

Unfortunately other yard from Dduallt can't be fitted at the other end, beyond Goat Tunnel, so Himself is going to try and knock up something basic with a couple of sidings on one of the blank baseboards.

He has also been honoured with a visit from the Artistic Director who has fluttered some paintbrushes in the general direction of the stone walls which have sprung up around Cwm Cloch farmyard.



As you can see, one half of this board has now been plastered and painted in a very fetching shade of brown base coat. It may have cultivated some grass by the time it goes on show at the agricultural college.

If Walls Could Talk...

....they could tell you exactly how they're painted.

Unfortunately, I can't, on account of being hundreds of miles away on the occasion when the Artistic Director arrived with his brushes and pots of acrylic paint to finish off the walls lining the road near the 'Bridge To Nowhere'.

The results are most certainly up to his usual standard..



Lying in the road you can just make out the height warning triangle signs which are about to be installed on the bridge.



Thanks to the wonders of modern home computing it was a relatively simple task to scan an image of a sign with the correct bridge dimensions, re-size it and then print out a miniature version (twice) to mount on the model.

By the way, you can read a little more about Francis' technique with acrylics in this post.