...or, in layman's terms, bu**er.

I had been planning to try and get tracklaying complete during this week, as it's my annual kind-of week off. However, before beginning, last week I had a chat with model railway friends, and they informed me I was right of something I had been concerned about. I have been using cork to boost the height of the copper clad strip up to the underside of the rails for the board ends, but I felt it was really too soft for the job. My friends agreed. I was able to get hold of brass bar of the right size amazingly quickly, delivered on Friday. But on trying to put things in place, it became all too quickly apparent that my efforts to get board ends flat and level with each other weren't good enough. Even small imperfections were being shown up alarmingly by using the brass. So, I've had to take several steps backwards to examine just how off my dowel alignments are, and try and correct them. This has been disheartening, and has meant I haven't wanted to deal with the layout this week. The dowel positioning has been the most tricky part of this whole build, and I really didn't want to have to revisit it. I have started, but I think work on fixing them will be slow.

A couple of pictures showing the brass bar arrangments on two of the narrow sections:

😔