Most railway companies would recycle components from use on a main line down into sidings and track of lesser importance. Following this practice (and because at £20 for 500 chairs they aren't cheap) I decided to try and remove some of the components off the old Empire Basin for reuse. Fortunately the chairs were willing to separate from the sleepers with a little persuasion and with not too much cleaning up some lengths of rail were made available to the track gang for reuse in the goods yard.

All I need to do now is sell the redundant 4mm scale sleepers to a 4mm scale garden centre!

Overall the progress is coming on nicely, I could actually go mad and lay the complete up line round the room now but I think I'll try and finish the rest of the point work first. The point trailing towards the viewer is the main goods yard entrance and leads into a double slip. The large hole was intended to be for the lever frame but I'm having a slight change of plan there. What I'm going to do now is build the lever frame in a box which will slide into position in front of that hole but also be removable so it can be put elsewhere (on my desk for example). The use of CBUS means that it only needs a single CAT5 network cable to connect it to the layout.

I beginning to look forward to thinking about scenery! I wondering if the long goods siding at the back should be just a lay-by or if I should fit a small roadway down to the track level so it could be used for loading (coal yard maybe?).

David