Hi Again,

A quick entry on the baseboard and building mock-ups to get a feel for the layout. The baseboard is a rather simple affair with a sheet for 4x2ft 6 mm ply on top of a softwood frame. I added some diagonal bracing to stiffen things up, but it's probably a bit of overkill... Plan is to fill the underneath of the board with expanding foam to reduce noise (leaving a few clear areas for the limiting wiring, most of which can be surface-run anyway)

Sector plates were marked on from the track plan, and roughly cut out with a jigsaw (setting up the router with pivot arm seemed bit overkill!). I inset a couple of M6 threaded inserts to act as centres of the sector plate pivots. I'll see how well a simple bolt through the ply works before doing anything more complex...

I cut ~120 mm from the front of the board and inset it under the main board to make the bottom of the dock. The step here is about 15mm, as the dock is non-tidal and designed to deal with low sided canal barges. The water is only 2--3 ft below the dock. Below is the final board with sector plates. I couldn't see any reason to trim down the sector plates anymore... The board has now had a couple of coats of varnish to seal it.

Hmmm... really need to tidy up the workbench and sweep the floor!!

I've also been making up a few mock buildings based on the few aerial photographs I've found online and in books. I also found a few pictures at the excellent Grangemouth Hertiage Trust - which has a huge collection of ephemera and photos taken by people in grangemouth.

The buildings seem to single story hip roofed affairs, made of brick or perhaps ashlar in a few places. I think roofs were slated. The sheds had rows of (presumably cast-iron) posts holding them up, represented by the too-short bolts I think the actual buildings will be card+paper over a foam-board shell.

A venerable smokey-joe from my childhood serving as a dock tank

Next step is to slightly revise the track plan based on the look of the buildings, and then start getting some track down...