Now I have all the frames in place I can turn my attention to the track bed. As you will see below I have had my plans from SCARM printed out 1 to 1 which cost me £60 +VAT. I considered that this was money well spent as I have glued these to my 9mm birch ply to guide all the cutting work. I took some measurements of the plans before starting and was really impressed with the accuracy achieved (I used Plan Printing UK who are in Edinburgh). When I exported the drawings from SCARM I imported them to CorelDraw but any vector based package would do. This enabled me to arrange the plans before printing so that the various parts would fit on to 8' x 4' sheets of plywood. It really helps to avoid waste by being able to position the track bed sections onto the sheet area. The max width I could get printed at a reasonable cost was 840mm., therefore I divided my 8' x 4' sheets into 840mm wide strips - got these printed and pasted them onto the wood.

I tried using diluted PVA but this did not go well, it caused the paper to distort - very luckily I had only used it on one small strip which was straight so no permanent harm done. So I forked out and bought some spray mount glue - 2 tins and this has proved to be a good move. The paper goes down flat and is repositionable should I make an error. I concentrate the glue under the tracks so that it is easier to recycle some of the waste ply.

With the plans stuck to the board I then used a scalpel to trace the centre line of the tracks - this is so that when I do away with the paper once the boards are cut - the centre line remains, it being useful for laying the woodland scenics underlay I intend to use later. The scalpel did work but I really wanted a deeper groove as when removing the paper from the ply I needed to use a sander at times and this made the cut from the scalpel hard to see. I tried a fine "V" cutter in the palm router but this was not easy to control. Finally I remembered I had a Faller groove cutter from years ago when I was modelling continental railways - I'm not using the faller system here but the groove cutter came in useful and easily made the neatest groove of the methods I had tried. Although this was time consuming I did not want to lose the "data" I had on the printed sheet. The Faller tool overheats very quickly and so I found it a little frustrating waiting for it to cool down, however I'm sure it's not meant for this amount of work in one go.

Here you can see the fine grove marking the centreline of the track bed.

So far, apart from the initial panic when using PVA (trying to keep costs down) things appear to be going well and have certainly alleviated the need for lengthy marking out. I am regularly checking dimensions and all seems good. 

The parts are cut with a jigsaw and then I have a 3mm rounding over bit for my palm router. As the boards are 9mm I'm routing the top and bottom edge as this leaves a tidy edge and saves me from much sanding work. Some of these components will be exposed under the layout so I did not want any sharp edges catching me out whilst wiring etc.

Raining now, it was sunny an hour ago😲, hence the update, as soon as it dries again I'll get back to it but progress feels quite rapid which is encouraging - maybe all that planning is paying off.

Cheers