Glaciers may have moved faster than my modelling efforts over the last few weeks, but this is what I've been doing. It's all a load of old cobbles, or that's the plan, at any rate.

Inspired by the output from Brian Harrap, I bought a tub of this:

Brian actually uses Tetrion tile grout, as it's harder than most other types and, therefore, ideal for individually scribing the cobbles on with a steel pin in a pin vice, but I couldn't find any locally, so settled for Tetrion filler instead. It seems to dry pretty hard, sands down well and lends itself to a bit of experimental cobble scribing:

The area requiring permanent cobbling is the viewing side of the goods shed on Callow Lane, where the road approach crosses a siding in the yard. This clearly needs to have in-laid track, to enable road vehicles, horses and carts etc. to get to the loading bay of the goods shed. I decided that this would look good if cobbled, having been long impressed by Brian's brilliant work on layouts like Quai 87.

To begin with, I grouted the area between the check rails (for some reason lost in the mists of time, these are phosphor bronze...):

And that's about as far as I got for a while, in practical terms, because I had forgotten about the effect of water-based Tetrion filler on the steel running rails. They had been primed and sprayed track colour a few years ago (yes, that's how long this layout is taking me ), but it was evidently not enough, as the first attempt at laying Tetrion up to the outside edge of the running rail nearest the goods shed resulted in the tell-tale colour of rust seeping through into the white filler, as it dried.

This led to me removing a whole strip of Tetrion, some 1 cm wide, cleaning up the rail, applying rust inhibitor and then more primer. After that, I filled the trench with Milliput (fine, white) filler. I then found I needed to 'top up' the ground surface with more Tetrion prior to sanding the whole lot smooth, which I finally achieved tonight.

The resulting ground surface is approx 2 mm higher than the cork underlay, on which the adjacent track is laid. This will give a ground surface more or less level with the tops of the sleepers, once it's all grouted in and blended together.

I also had to bring the ground surface right up to the outside walls of the removable goods shed. To do this, I laid some 2mm x 2mm plastic strip from Evergreen around the 'footprint' of the shed and grouted right up to it with the Tetrion.

This is what it looked like after I removed the plastic strip this evening, ready for the goods shed to be put in place:

And here's the goods shed temporarily in place:

Of course, I didn't manage to get the initial application of filler right up to the precise location of the outer walls, and the above photos reflect this fact. The plan all along was then to cover the outer walls of the goods shed with cling film and then fill the resulting cracks between the ground and the base of the walls with more filler.

The cling film got torn in a couple of places, I was very careful when applying the Tetrion in these places...:

Here's an example of filler put into the crack between the building and the ground, waiting to harden off:

This last stage with the cling film wouldn't really be necessary if the building wasn't going to be portable/removable, as I could have used scenic material such as grass fibres or other ground cover to fill the gaps, but the goods shed is very heavy (plastercast Townstreet kit), so I daren't leave it glued to the baseboards.

Next step is to remove the goods shed and cling film when it's fully hardened off, sand smooth and start scribing cobbles.

Oh, and there's also the other side to do yet, too...

Captain's Log, Supplementary - 24/10/12:

Here are a couple of photos of prototype cobbles or setts, taken from the back streets around Bristol TM, which I am intending to copy on Callow Lane: