The above shows an unpainted concrete floor for a steam-era shed. I hope!

Basically I needed to make a proper concrete floor to the shed to give it some realism. I followed Andy Y's advice on his excellent Keyhaven thread (thankfully and delightfully fully ported for RMweb's viewing pleasure) by using Polyfilla. Easy to mould, quick to dry, and then easy to sand down, its a perfect tip for making something look like concrete. And this was my very first attempt...I plan on trying this again sometime in 0-16.5 scale...!

To begin with, I marked out my area for filling. I used some spare Peco girders, left over from an overall roof kit, which were cut to shape and then stuck down to the baseboard and between the tracks.

Note that the area for filling in is quite small - I am only modelling one end of the shed as its the only end that'll get seen on camera:

The next job was to start sticking down some string onto the inside of the rails. The reason for this is simple - the width of the string is enough to allow the wheels of the locomotives to roll along unhindered, and also allows a fairly realistic "tramway" or otherwise concrete railroad to be produced:

Having done that, I laid down some newspaper and started putting down some Polyfilla. I used a spreader to make the polyfilla as even as possible (as well as taking up the excess to use later on.

As you can see from the post below, I left the Polyfilla to dry before taking the string out:

By the end of a two hour polyfilla session, I was left with this, which I in turn left to dry:

It was left to dry naturally and naturally cracked in places! This is a good thing, I've not come across any stretch of concrete that doesn't have at least a few cracks running through it. I painted it a few days later using a watery grey, black and rust solution , carefully cleaning the rails after painting and giving it a few more coats every so often until I was satisfied. It then looked like this:

And that was that! A simple method that worked beautifully, all credit to Andy Y really as it was a straightforward job with very little hassle. I was incredibly nervous about doing this, I had visions of nothing working or running across the track, but so far the only problems I've had have been on the circuit and not in the yard at all (and especially not on the concrete!!!)

The next blog post will concern the building of the Carriage Works backscene seen in the above pic.

Until next time!