After much moving house, a little wagon building, some minor procrastinating and a great deal of trackplan re-working, Trevanion Dries has re-surfaced, at last in a more permanent guise. The new siding arrangement, although not maximising the amount of 'visible' trackwork, does increase the operational possibilities by some margin over the last plan. The two boards measure 100 x 30cm each and the trackwork is raised 5.5cm above the floor to allow for an embankment. In a flat without a proper spare room, this allows the boards to be slid under furniture when not in use by detaching the backscene. Most of the trackwork is complete and wired, with just the turnout to the departure siding and the siding itself to finish. As this project is a testbed for new skills and techniques, turnout construction is a mixture of 3 methods. The turnout at the St. Austell end is Easitrac, the departure siding is PCB built using a jig, and the crossover is PCB built on top of paper template using gauges (very early stages covered in an earlier blog). All will be powered by simple sliding switches connected to wire-in-tube, simultaneously changing frog polarity.

Simple schematic (NB the run-round loop will accommodate up to 6 CDAs. Longer trains can be run round prior to shunting by using the road through the slurry loading terminal):

Plan view of work on 'scenic' side (viewing area 110cm wide):

Fiddle yard at 'works' end, which can align simultaneously with all 3 roads leading into the works. Tracks are splayed to the left of the photo to allow for fingers in between rolling stock:

Turntable at 'St Austell' end (still in progress with 4 more roads to add), inspired by Jerry Clifford's 'Tucking Mill':

Lastly, a view from eye level. Not especially neat or tidy! The thin MDF backscene is a temporary measure:

Next stage is completion of the trackwork, connection of the point blades to the sliding switches, painting of the track, and setting the 'concrete' by the loading area after thorough testing. I've also been reading up on the Association's 08 replacement chassis which is looking like a very tempting project...