So a little expansion a around the room has given me a neat fiddle yard, which will be a "through" yard once I drawbridge the door, and will have an extra road when I change to streamline points. 46444 and Wiggoforgold may be slightly upset at the yard contents today as I've been playing with modern image. No fear though- Buckden is still being built firmly in steam era and that stock will be back out of the boxes soon. I'm going to ballast and ground cover the fiddle yard so it will be semi-scenic. At the end you can spot a slightly naughty 1st radius curve - but most of my stock seems to get around it ok.

On the scenic boards proper I've been putting in the slight embankment. For this I've started with polystyrene sheet, pva-d to the boards with plenty of weight (Railway Modeller is very handy as you can see!) and a few track pins where the glue was a bit wobbly. I've then skimmed the surface with polyfilla.

At the rear I've planned out where the boundary fences and other fencing are going, and drilled 1.6 mm holes at 8ft (32 mm) spacing for the Ratio 419 concrete fence posts. I think I'll only wire up two or three of the six holes in these - originally I was going to scratch build the posts (even buying the plastic strip) but life's too short! I'm going to use either elastic which has been suggested if I can track down some thin stuff, or stainless fine guage wire which I can source from work.

The loading guage is in too - another Ratio product which goes together very nicely (this is the 411 GWR/LMS joint design). It's the other side of the goods shed from in the prototype, neccersary because the compression I've used in the yard would otherwise put it over a point.

A wee accident flattened one of my one of my yard lights, but I decided to make the best of a bad thing and salvaged the lamp head for the goods shed. All the lamps got a coating of phoenix dirty black to take the shine off.

Marcus.