It's been rather a long time since my last entry, leading to some queries if I and the project are doing OK. Well, I'm fine but the layout has been in abeyance for quite a while because I allowed the prospect of hand scribing all the cobble to over-face me and off I went on my full size restoration work. I'm still involved with that but have had a bout of renewed enthusiasm for the layout and modelling in general recently.

As a result, there's been progress with the layout, the latest loco and some coach conversions (from OO to P4).

On the layout, I found that the remaining areas of cobbles hadn't scribed themselves in the intervening period so I knucked down to it and finished the lot in a couple of weeks!

The next job is to paint them. As I recall from my youth, cobble stones in the North West tended to be a pale buff colour (rather than granite coloured) and the joints filled with tar, so I am thinking of a grey/brown acrylic paint with a very thin wash of dark grey/black which, hopefully, will settle in the scribe lines - like panel lines on military models. Better try out this on some spare card before committing to the layout!

The final arrangement of cobbles extends over two of the base-boards but I forgot to photograph the two together before I split them and put the sections away for Christmas visitors. However, I did take a few shots of the main station board, which allows comparison with the previous photos. Unfortunately, the scribing doesn't show up too well on the white card, but you can get the idea. The cut out strip next to the run round in the loop line is to accommodate two rows of wooden sleepers. I imagine these were installed to make it easier to access the chairs in case of track maintenance. Photos of Delph show these quite clearly and also the fact they were only applied at this one place. Otherwise, the cobbles go right up to the side of the rails.

First, a couple of shots from the buffer stops:

And one looking the other way. The join where the next board connects follows the coarses of the cobbles not the base-board joint. When assembled, the join is fairly neat and not too intrusive.

One issue which has arisen is that the "ash"" ballast I used has faded from dark grey to a fawn sort of colour, so some unexpected painting will be required at some stage. Oh well.

Dave.