Following on from my mis-judgement of the actual length of the two main baseboards, even though it was only by a few millimetres, I went up to the excellent TimberCut in Marsh Barton, Exeter yesterday, where an extremely helpful chap cut me some new pieces of 6mm birch ply for the main backscene sections, plus the permanent end pieces as well.

Further work was done outside this morning.

Here we see the goods shed board, with the main backscene piece, and permanent end piece attached to the board:

A removable piece will be fitted to the road overbridge end, which will form part of the removable layout cover:

At the opposite end of the main road overbridge is another small bridge over the single line to Coalpit Heath West Junction. This as featured in a previous blog entry, and clearances are deliberately tight. Here I've put a box van up against the plywood to measure the loading gauge:

The aperture has now been cut out:

View through the hole, at the site of the narrow bridge:

Back at the main road overbridge end, the removable end piece has now been fitted. This is held in place with two bolts and wing nuts, but the layout cover will be attached to the top and front, in due course:

I have off-set the main birch ply piece with a strip of 4mm ply, below track level. This is to ensure that the layout cover doesn't touch or damage the girder bridge when it's removed or fitted:

On to the other main board, which features the level crossing, signal box and cottage backs. Here we see the permanent end piece bolted in position, with one of the Mark 1s from the Matford 'Dawlish Donkey' set up against the ply for gauge measurement:

The double track 'hole in the sky' will be partially obscured by a 'view blocker' low relief building, and I've also been thinking about other ways to further disguise it.

Here the aperture for the double track has been cut out:

At this point it was getting rather warm and I wanted my lunch. Just before I packed everything away, I realised that I hadn't cut the aperture out for the private siding at the back, that disappears behind the end of a row of four cottages, on it's way to the chocolate factory. We went out this afternoon, so I'll do that in due course.