Well - where to start. I have just checked my last blog entry and so much has changed since I published that one.

First off - In June last year I decided that the double track I had laid on a narrow flimsy board round the room was annoying me and I hated having to crawl underneath the board to get into the room so all of that came out.

In its place I started to construct some proper baseboards with separate removable legs out of 9mm plywood, the idea being that I could then build on them in the future & use them for anything really. By the end of the summer I had constructed 5 baseboards each about 1m / 700mm and 2 bridging sections. I then re laid the track but had severe problems with the bridging section across the door, a few derailments later (and some damaged stock) lead to a complete redesign of this section. Other commitments meant that I didn't get round to finishing this until April / May this year. 'The Bridge Mk2' was successfully installed using plywood and settrack, the other difficulty with it is that it crosses the doorway on an angle as it forms part of a curve so the rails don't line up at the joins - using settrack seems to keep it all aligned though.

The second project is my long running station rebuild based on (EDIT Rothley) station on the Great Central - others had mentioned to me that it is possible to buy a GC station now but I countered this by saying that it is too long and wouldn't fit my scaled down platform. I visited the GC in August 2011 and took many photos of the architecture, I then produced some detailed scaled down drawings and proceeded to build the waiting room. I finished this only 2 months ago (apart from detailing) and instantly moved on the next part - the booking office and associated canopy over the end of the stairs. The canopy will be a modified Dapol kit.

Other projects are 009 in nature and include building a small kit loco a 'Montania' (1.5 inches long) for my scrapyard boxfile layout