Back in the day new railways were always started with great ceremony. Contemporary reports always describe how the town band would play 'suitable tunes' (what would be considered an 'unsuitable tune' in 1850-60 I wonder?) and the shareholders would be treated to a meal befitting the occasion.

So yesterday was spent in Makespace cutting 6mm ply with a lasercutter and this afternoon spent assembling the resulting kit of parts. As is usually there were a few places where 40 watts didn't quite go through the ply (you sometimes get a dense spot in one of the middle layers of the ply which you can't see) but it wasn't too hard to sort out. I marked out the track position from templot on the top surface, more for encouragement than practical purpose at this point, a centre-line would have been just as good. I found a couple of mistakes where I had positioned a tab 6mm out but this could also be dealt with without having to resort to re-cutting.

The first board of my 'Stour Valley' layout to be assembled is the goods yard board, the main line can be seen just cutting the right-hand corned of the board. There is a piece to add to the corner of this board so that the track will actually cross the baseboard joint in the foreground at right-angles to the edge of the board. The goods shed will straddle the baseboard joint on the back line.

From the opposite end you can see the cut outs for the power and control bus sockets, there is a second lamination of 6mm ply to take the thickness of the ends up to 12mm. Holes have also been cut for baseboard joiner dowels and bolts. The laser cutter I have access to has a maximum size of 900x600mm so you can see that the board is actually made in two halves. The joint in the top surface coincides with one of the bracing pieces which ties the two parts together. The other odd holes are to support brackets for legs. I've also cut the elongated holes for the point blade operating mechanism.

Underneath so far I have just fastened the cross-braces which tie into the surface of the board. Having assembled the first board I think that the 50mm depth of the frame, which fine for the 'gubbins' I want to hang underneath, is still leaving the board a little too flexible.

I think I will cut some diagonals and fit them into the different sections, which I can fortunately manage without messing up any plans. I think I'll cut these slightly oversize on the cutter and then sand the ends off on the belt sander to make a tight fit.

Just to give you an idea of the second board, this is part of the kit of parts. This board is ~4'3"x 2 to get the baseboard joints to sit nicely between the track work. In the foreground is the Ashen Road end of the loop and behind that the point into the yard and the double-slip. The two sidings on the right at the rear actually terminate at the baseboard edge, the near on being an end loading dock.

I think the next step will be to get some cork underlay, ideally as a sheet rather than a roll, and use the laser to mark on it where the sleepers and rails will be. Having drawn nice flowing track in Templot I'm paranoid about messing it all up as I transfer the track on to the board. I usually build track 'off-board' but then fit there is always a little flex as you try to take the point off the bench and onto the layout. Perhaps even worse is trying to get the alignment on the board correct as I always seem to find that .5mm out of true at one end becomes 3" once you get the other end of the layout.

So, finally a start has been made on actually doing some modelling again following a break of almost 12 months for a house extension. I'm planning to work on these two boards of the Scalefour empire while also working on the Fen End Pit rebuild. I should be able to keep both projects in the railway room at the same time.

Hopefully Blog updates will be more frequent if I actually have some modelling to blog about.

Now to press publish and see if the title falls victim to the 'Scunthorpe problem'

David