Hi,

It's been another couple of months since the last update, but this time there's a fair bit of progress to show for it.

Shows

Middleton Railway, Model Railway Show - 27th / 28th June (2 Months) - http://www.middletonrailway.org.uk/

TINGS 2015 - 12th / 13th September 2015 (4 Months) - http://www.ngaugeshow.co.uk/

Storage Boxes

Allot of progress has been made with the storage boxes. The 3 storage boxes for the straight scenic boards have now been completed. They are a fairly uncomplicated 2" x 1" internal frame which is then clad in 6mm ply. The closed and open ends of the box being made out of 9mm ply and have rope handles added to them. The storage boxes have a set of 1" x 1" rails fitted internally and the scenic boards have a pair of 1" x 1" slides added to them and this allows the boards to slide into the boxes.

This still leaves us with 2 boxes to make for the curved boards. The intention is that these will be constructed in exactly the same way and that the curved boards would again use the rail and slide system to lock the boards into the boxes. Currently we have the top and bottom of a frame made up to test the fit, but I can see allot of head scratching when it comes to getting the rails and slides working on these

Signals

More work has been done on the signals, the decision on what connector type to use has been made and we have chosen to use 5 way JST connectors (similar to those found in Dapol coaches for the light bars). These give us a nice reliable connection and hopefully we can plant a working signal on the layout in the next few days.

We are also going to be adding signals onto the end loop boards, to protect the entrances to the Fiddle Yard.

Catenary

The Portals are now completed with the remaining Register Arms having been fitted. We've had an issue with the Portals for a little while, in that the 2 track Portals are slightly smaller in height than the 3 track versions. To fix this we lowered the 3 track portals by shortening the legs, but as the 3 track portals were done in 2 or 3 batches, one of the batches ended up being slightly higher than the others. Although this wasn't a major problem, it looked a bit strange visually, so the offending portals have now had their legs trimmed. This meant we had to re-attach the magnetic bases we are using, and as we didn't have access to my wife's canned goods, we used glasses to keep the portals vertical while the epoxy resin set.

New Bridge

Now that we're starting the final push on the scenic work, one of our team had previously built a diorama of a local bridge near Colton Junction on the Leeds - York line and we've decided to incorporate this on the right hand side of the layout. He had to re-work a little of the terrain, but it looks quite at home there now.

Shunting Frame

Our 'bridge builder' has also been hard at work scratch building a small shunting frame that we will position close to the entrance to the on-scene sidings. As the mainline points would probably be operated from a signal box some miles away, we thought it would be a nice touch to include a building that would effectively control the siding points and the access to the off-scene industry.

Head Shunt Loco Platform

We're also adding a raised metal platform which runs alongside the Head Shunt, this would be used by the loco drivers when they were switching ends and also to provide easy access to a small office which will be positioned at that end of the sidings.

The platform is actually a kit which comes as a very nice brass etch from PH Designs. In order to get the desired length we wanted for a mainline loco, we've actually built up two of these kits and will fit them back to back. Allowing for my poor skills with a soldering iron, I think it's come out pretty well and its going to look great on the layout.

Cheers, Mark.