As alluded to in my last comment Up the Line will be out and about again this Saturday - well half of it will be! For reasons that will become apparent very shortly, scheduled maintenance work has over run (sound familiar?) and as it is a slightly more informal gathering than a full blown exhibition, just a couple of boards are going. That will be nice and easy I thought - am sure you can guess where this is going!

Details for the show can be found here http://www.ngtrains.com/Pages/Admin/Shows/TVG3/tvg3.htm

Completely underestimated the number of adjustments (and bodges!), that would be necessary to give a decent presentation. Among the highlights - a new temporary fiddle yard;

which of course meant a new place to hang the handset and a wonderfully bodged back scene support;

Really not sure why I showed you that one as not proud of it!

Will keep one of the end boards for packing attached to the end as a buffer stop but have had to fit a packing piece to make it stand proud a bit so that the back scene will fit between it and the board end and then double back on itself to be clipped in place actually making a rather nice curve;

I run out of pictures here but have had to make a new half sized lighting strip as the proper one spans the two boards and a new fascia panel in one really awkward piece of 8x4 black Corex that will be great fun to fit in the car! Quite a lot of rewiring involved as well and to make everything even more pleasant it is bloody cold in the glorified shed where it all lives!

One of the reasons that it is not all going is that I have carried out my threat to revamp the fiddle yards but am only half way through so the one end looks like this at the moment and I have yet to decide exactly what will go at the other end;

The other threat I have carried out is to make a better job of the track alignment between the baseboards. Yes, I know that I really should have done it properly in the first place but that is a lesson learned and as various things regarding legs and board connections were made up as I went along my oversight is almost justifiable!

These pics should explain what has been going on;

This should make setting up the boards far easier as will not be messing about with fish plates and hopefully the running over them should be much better. Coupled to all of this I have been rather belatedly trying to sort out the various loco failures that occurred at the last outing - not my favorite task! Am getting there but will cover the various problems in a separate post when I have a moment somewhere between wielding a soldering iron, cursing pick ups and shivering!