From the last time I made a blog posting about the layout progress, it might not be seen as major progress. I've painted the baseboard top, to cover up the felt tip drawings of the track locations.

This is not for beautification purposes, but to allow the track planning to progress, so that I can decide the exact location of the canal.

This will allow it's construction and when that is complete, not including the ground cover, the completion of the baseboard. This will include the backscene etc.

I've also been drawing the point templates for the construction of the paintwork. I'll be using PCB sleepering and solder construction, but more about that in later posts. I have taken delivery the sleeper, a few days ago.

I use trax, version 3 to design and print the templates, below is a photograph of the computer screen showing 4 points, 2 left and 2 right. You will notice they are slightly curved on the main road. Points on the real railway are rarely have a strait main road.

The points are effectively fine scale setract points. This is because of the site constraints of the model and that the prototype would have used small radius points for similar reasons. It was constructed as a horse drawn tramway, linking two canals and was only connected to the main line network, as an after thought!

Julie