A fair amount of progress has been made with Mercia Wagon Repair over the last 6-8 weeks. However this has involved a number of revisions and minor tweaks.

The layout - or at least the "main line"  side of it , which was all that had been laid - had been test run  a few times. This amounted to running in a train behind a type 5, the loco running round and picking up a train of wagons waiting in the departure siding , then returning whence it came. The shunter would then shunt the incoming wagons into the departure siding. I have bought one of the NGS Hunslet shunters in Railtec blue and white livery to supplement my Farish 04. It's a very small loco, and modestly priced at £81, and it certainly runs very slowly, which is a plus for a shunter. But despite all the plaudits it doesn't run as smoothly as the 04. I'm reminded of a lot of small 4mm kitbuilt locos - it seems to have a certain faster/slower waddle though (like them) it doesn't stall. I don't regret my purchase, but it isn't my best loco and I'm not sure I'd buy two

Along the way I had set about converting the couplers from Arnold Rapido to Dapol Micro-couplers . This is an expensive exercise : even buying packs of 10 couplers it works out at just over 5 pounds per vehicle. I bought a pack each of medium and long , and then found that the long version is something of an embarrassment. On almost anything it looks a bit like the couplers on 1930s Hornby tinplate, projecting far beyond the vehicle. The shorts are too short for most stock, but I did  just about manage to find homes for the contents of the pack. The medium is the bread-and-butter coupling, and I'm now on my third pack of mediums.

To the point. I went to start work laying the wagon works itself , and discovered that I seemed to have bought the wrong handed points...

Acxtually I hadn't. I'd merely not bothered to check the plan and had happily proceeded on normal railway principles. The plan is to be found here   and you will notice that the bottom road of the actual works comes off the upper road of the loop, via a reverse curve and there's a somewhat odd arrangement whereby the topmost road comes off a wrong-handed point and goes round the back of the works on an awkward reverse curve. I'd assumed that everything came off in the normal way through a nice conventional fan of points.

I contemplated ripping up the recently laid top road to follow the plan as drawn for about half a second, and decided I didn't much like the idea of shunting wagons through all those reverse curves and access through the loop being required every time you wanted to shunt in or out of one road of the workshop. Nor, I think, would the real railway. Presumably the plan was drawn that way to save on length and get everything on a 6' long (ahem 180cm) board in HO

I am not short of length when it comes to the wagon works. The space constraints are the length of the loop, and the length of the entry/fiddle siding to the left , plus the length of  headshunt required to take an FEA twin-set plus a shunter. Those constraints limit me to a 66 + 3 bogie wagons and a 4 wheel wagon in my 6' in N . But the wagon works sidings are pretty long, so I don't need to compress the fan of points into them.

Then it became apparent that a short and a medium point weren't going to fit in before the board joint . The second point just overlapped the joint - largely thanks to the fact that you can't join Peco code55 N points one after another like you can in OO . They foul each other at the divergance, so a small length of plain track needs to be spliced in.

So I bit the bullet - the second point was displaced onto the left hand board , clear of the board framing, and I decided to go for a large radius point at the divergance of the first workshop road

All this shoved the start of the hard standing in front of the workshop about 6" to the left of the board joint. That was the end of my plan to use the change from ballast to hard standing to disguise the board joint. An access path across the tracks will have to do the job instead.

Here we have progress , with only one siding to go in. That siding is now going to incorporate a Peco inspection pit inside the shed, though not for the full length of it. Since this requires me to cut a slot in the board laying this has been deferred .... 

Having got  something like a layout laid, of course it had to be test run, to check nothing fell off (and also to see how it would actually feel if operated as envisaged)

The front siding is the departure road, where wagons that have been through the works are held pending a mainline loco  taking them back onto the network. A train of wagons for repair is standing in the "fiddle" road, representing the connection to the national network. (The limitations on train length are obvious.) As this is in front , it will have to be scenic - I have added a spare bit of flexible track in front as the stub end of an abandoned siding , where an abandoned wagon can be held. This should really be slightly further forward : the intention is to imply that a former double track approach line has been singled. I intend to add a "holding track " at the front , between the two groups of switches . This will be firmly off stage and this front area painted stage black.

What you see is nearly all my serviceable N gauge stock... It became painfully obvious that to run the layout when complete everything I have , including unbuilt kits, would need to be pressed into  service. I am therefore compelled to buy more rolling stock.

I have also been checking dimensions and trying to mock up backscene buildings , based on possible downloads and the Pikestuff material I have. (N gauge stock boxes found a use here)

This is a closeup of the  actual wagonworks area. My various pencil marks as exact arrangements were amended can be seen

The IPA twin and the Network Rail open mark the location of the actual works shed, more or less. This has now shrunk to 12" long from 15" , and it should have a lean-to store/office along the front. It will be a Pikestuff 2  road shed , extended  and with the roof omitted except for a short strip front and back. The rear track is behind the shed : the missing road with the inspection pit  will fit in the gap. Dapol uncoupler magnets have been laid across the door positions: all this area will be inlaid into concrete flooring so they will be hidden . The Cargowaggon is in an area behind the shed which will be used for holding wagons that have arrived and are awaiting their turn in the shed. Behind it is the NGS Hunslet - there is an isolating section here, to hold a "back shunter"

The VTG hood marks the location of the paintshop. This will be the Pikestuff Atkinson Engine Facility, which has a front leanto office . That office, it is now apparent , will block road 2 of the shed, which will have to stop short

And here we see how Mercia Wagon Repair uses my hifi speakers as trestles. There are plates of single ply faced in baize for them to rest on, to protect the speakers - the controller and external CDU box sit on top of the hifi cabinet.

This is a lot less disruptive of normal use of the room than Blacklade , which has to be erected diagonally across the room