Hi,

With had our last club meeting of the year at the weekend, so it was a good time for everybody to get together and make some headway on the layout.

Bridge

Excellent progress is being made with the Bridge and things are really taking shape now. Brick cladding has been added to most of the main structure and the piers are looking fantastic.

Buildings

We also have a few industrial units and a signal box being constructed. The basic structure of the buildings is being built in thick card, then the building is being clad in textured plasticard to add relief. You can see the signal box in this picture and I will post an update with the industrial units in a few days.

Catenary

As we are modelling an electrified line we are making use of N Brass Loco's excellent Mk1 Catenary etched brass kits. On the main scenic boards, we are using the 3 track portals and on the end loops we are using the 2 track portals. As the 3 track portals have already been built, I volunteered to put the 2 track versions together. I haven't done much if anything with brass before, so for me this ended up being a bit of a steep learning curve. Forming the legs and the main gantry was quite easy, but I found that with the legs being so small, it was hard to get an accurate bend around the former and more often than not a little attention was needed to square things.

To assemble the kits I decided to solder them together. This was relatively simple, but I found I had been using way to much solder to start off with, but once I started to be more sparing with the solder (and flux) the results got better and I had to do less filing and cleaning up. When the portals are together though, they seem to be quite sturdy, which will be good for us as we intend them to be lifted off the layout when it's being stored. To make them removable, we have designed some 3d printed bases which accept the portal legs and also a 3mm dia. x 1mm high magnet in the base. When a washer is glued to the baseboard this provides an accurate and stable fixing, without having to have any pins etc. It also looks like the portal is fitted to a concrete base.

With the Portals together, the next job was to fit the Register Arms and Cable Supports. This is quite a time consuming and fiddly job. The arms come in two pieces which have to be soldered together, then you need to add the insulators. On average it's taking around 2 hours to fit the arms to 3 portals and there are another 14 to do

The result is rewarding though as they look pretty good when done. Just need to paint them now.

Cheers, Mark.