On Sunday last we had another of our occasional work days, whereupon the main body of the hall where the club is based is taken over for about six hours. This extended club session enables us to carry out some more involved work, as well as set a number of layouts up and have a play. This time, we had the boards for Fredrichstrasse set up, with Yamanouchi Oshika, Warehouse District and a member's private layout all being worked on in some way.

Fredrichstrasse had the basic plan drawn onto the boards during the previous Friday night meeting, with further activity on the Sunday trying to refine which is actually quite a complicated design when taking into account the street plans, river, viaduct and various structures. Our current plan for the scenic section - which will no doubt go through any number of iterations - is below:

The rough location of the viaduct carrying the tracks can be just about made out in this view of the river course.

Activity was not always white-hot during the day...

...but at least some of us were gainfully employed... Fixing point motors and wiring on Warehouse District

Replacing points and realigning track in the fiddle Yard on Yamanouchi Oshika. The fiddle yard has been giving some issues, as well as some of the track disagreeing with the Bullet trains; there has been more than one occasion we have experienced some rather spectacular derailments with fast-moving shinkansen. This time a slightly shortened - 12 carriages - 100 series bullet was the guinea pig. By the end of the day it was happily racing around the layout, perfectly stable.

The layout does look rather bare without the town section...

Only a couple of weeks until the open day, which will show Fredrichstrasse in the committee room (our normal abode) as a static display, with hopefully some trains running on Warehouse and definitely stuff running on Yamanouchi Oshika. As mentioned previously, these will be augmented by at least three other fully operational layouts, and a further three that should in varying degrees of completion.