Time for an update.

Over the summer we have been poking away at various projects on the layout and things are really starting to come together.

I've been working on a few early GWR wagons the past few weeks. Here is a mostly finished David Keen kit in front of one of the clay dries. Just need to finish the lettering and add couplings. Maybe a bit of weathering too.

I've got back to the water feature. I gave the whole thing a healthy coating of gloss varnish to simulate wet mud. In the end it came out better than I could have planned. Some parts either dried matt or flowed off without my noticing so there are "wet" and "dry" areas of mud producing an effect that is more realistic than if I had only applied the gloss to some areas.

Chris has been proceeding with the large clay dry. The mortar was washed in a few weeks ago and now the stone colour is going on. It is painted all over and then individual stones are picked out. It will then be dry-brushed to bring it all together.

I briefly investigated an electrical fault. One of the points has lost some power to the frog. There is power when it is set one way but not the other. It's fine with bogie diesels but small steam engines stop dead. I've found the fault but didn't feel like breaking out the soldering iron at the end of the day, so it goes on the to-do list.

Finally, I spent a while thinking about the scenery on the left hand side of the layout. It looks fine around the edges but between the tracks looks pretty bad. Bad enough that I've made a tread just for it. http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/90327-what-would-you-do-with-this-area/

Thanks for looking!