So safely back from the high seas I moved house (and so moved Buckden). My new train room is going to be a great home for the layout, but has meant there needs to be some reconfiguring. It'll return to continuous run but for now it's set up with a fiddle yard at the one end and nothing at the other. As this means it's now a shunting layout I decided to finally wire up the points. I'd installed SEEP motors under the boards for the four points on the scenic boards ages ago but hadn't got around to wiring them up. I was thinking that I'd do route control via a diode matrix at some point, but as I wanted to get it sorted fairly quickly I thought I'd go down a simpler route (maybe just for now) and following a trip to the Weston-super-Mare train show at the weekend got the components to build a mimic panel.

I had to do a bit of tweaking of the points but they now work very nicely from my 16V AC output from my aged Gaugemaster model D (although some of them buzz a bit!), and operation is now a lot of fun.

I've also been experimenting with platform surfacing. Buckden looks from photos to have had a fairly loose gravelly surface, so I'm thinking painted sand paper might work. Experiments suggest this looks quite good, but painting it with acrylics after glueing it to the plastic (with silicon adhesive) makes it lift a bit, so I think I will paint it, dry brush it and then attach. Hopefully will get on with this soon as I'm keen to make some progress quickly.

In other news I'm very excited that Hornby will be producing a J15 later in the year!