With the weather being nice and quiet, today I made a start on making the new higher level scenic shelf onto which some of the previous scenery is being moved and expanded. Moving the tracks to the centreline of the baseboard has given me some room behind, which I decided should be a brick retained higher level area to create the impression of the approaches to New Street or Walsall from the Rugeley direction, creating an urban backdrop which should highlight the trains nicely. Originally I was going to fix a batten across the shed wall and using some tongue and groove planks fixed to the 9mm ply offcuts I was using, fix the "L" shaped wooden former to it creating a stable support for the scenery. However, experiments with the large amount of polystyrene which wends its way to Fairbourne from Cornwall when I order my pasties by post has allowed me to adopt a simpler, but just as stable solution where two trimmed pieces of polystyrene, double height, provide the support under the shelf, with the T&G affixed to the front of the 9mm ply. This has the advantage of not having a plank of ply standing above the retaining wall sections, and creating a break of level where it abuts the Town Square, creating some visual interest. 

The revised St Flo's. I originally intended to have the bombed out ruin at the back and the new church at the front, but the height difference between the Station/Courthouse Square on the right and the lower level on the left led me to swap it round, so the access to the new church is off a car park behind the Bank. The white snowdrift on the right is going to be painted up as a sandstone outcrop with rough grass and hedges applied to it to create a natural rock feature. St Flo's ruins have been enlarged by the addition of a large ruined tower. Trees landscaping and half-depth trees will be added to disguise the join and a replacement backscene is probably going to be needed.  the retaining wall is an eBay purchase from Stafford.



The bank just fits onto the shelf, whilst the old Swan Centre and Station shops make up a shopping precinct.  The plywood will be treated to some nice Chinese block paving plasticard (another Tatbay purchase) and the tongue and groove will be painted and given some vegetation and boundary treatment to hide it.



The precinct will include the town market, whilst on the left, on the next plank, a multi-storey and the dole offices will fill the width. The public loos will be attached to the multi-storey, as many were during the 1960s.  The vegetation on the roof won't be there when finished!

The rebuild has included a flyover to disguise the entrance to the fiddle yard.  On the left, a Peedie models Council House on the Fagg End estate.  Fagg End phase 1 was developed on the "Radburn" principle of footways to the front whilst vehicular traffic went to the rear of the houses and occupied the site of old 19th Century slums and post-war "Prefabs" built as emergency housing.  The inner relief road is a one-way gyratory called "Euneda Highway" after the Saxon princess whose dowry lands were the site of the first "Wodin's Ford" settlement.  It's painted in texture paint, a "caramel" that is more nipple pink but a good facsimile of the colour of the M54, but will look less like nipple pink once weathered.  I've still to add signage, lights, parapet walls and the like.  On the right, the last few Prefabs remain, whilst the 19th Century terrace has recently been compulsory purchased ready for the redevelopment bulldozers to move in to start Fagg End phase 2.  In this one section you can see how redevelopment and highway planning dominated the 1960s right through to the 80s when I was studying Town Planning at Birmingham Poly.

The road is a set of road sections I 3d printed a while back, glued to a strip of batten and supported at one end by polystyrene  insulation from my regular Cornish pasty order, and a tatbay sourced bridge support at the other.

So, once I've assembled the remaining back scenery supports, I can return to the track, adding ballast, and completing the scenics .