June was a hot month, but we still got quite a bit done on the two "long Wednesdays". The first Wednesday, a short one, was a distraction night. No work was done on Chesworth - or the other layouts - while club members headed out in the fine evening air to play with live steam.

Unfortunately the footpath was the only surface smooth enough to get a decent run on. To be fair to the little Mamods though, the gravel on the car park was scale boulders. Maybe play with model tanks next time ...........

More serious work for us started on the second week. Much is still work in progress so this month your author will concentrate on what we plan to achieve.

The three boards we currently have take a single track light railway past a water mill and farm before taking a curve into a wayside station. The wayside station is ultra-simple - a single platform, no loop and a couple of sidings. The prototype we are basing this on is the K&ESR's Frittenden Road, although the station building will be one of the corrugated ones on the K&ESR's southern section. However the non-railway buildings will all be models of real locations around Horsham and for the watermill we have chosen Warnham Mill, about a mile out from Horsham town centre on the road to Dorking. Horsham museum have an archive of pictures and the curator found us this one of Warnham Mill in 1905.

The mill is still there, apparently with the mechanics still in situ, however its most recent use was, we think, a dog grooming parlour. However as some remedial work had to be done to the dam holding back the water fairly recently, some plans were downloadable from the council's planning portal. From that work could be started on producing plans to 4mm scale.

Our railway line has the same relationship to the Mill as Warnham Road does in real life, so the line has to bridge Red River and Boultings Brook. Boultings Brook goes through a culvert but Red River is a more substantial waterway. Apparently it was dug out by French POWs during the Napoleonic wars. Some idea of the scale of the works can be seen from this picture taken fifteen years ago from the Warnham Road.

The road bridge needs to be replaced by a rail bridge, and again we have gone to the Colonel Stephens railways for inspiration. This bridge near Eastry on the East Kent Railway is our inspiration

All that is very much work in progress so photos of their rendition in model form is for another time.

Tree Workshop

We estimate we are going to need twenty to thirty trees on this part of the layout. Sussex is after all a county with a lot of trees, a legacy of the former iron industry. Before Abraham Darby, up in Shropshire, pioneered smelting iron using coke, wrought iron was made smelting iron ore with charcoal. The process required a lot of hammering to force out the impurities, as well as a lot of charcoal. Hence the trees, which were once regularly coppiced to produce charcoal. It is also believed that Warnham millpond once drove water powered hammers for a forge before the mill was built. Whatever the case, this month we held a tree making workshop.

We are going for model trees created with a wire armature. Florists iron wire is one possibility, but we are also experimenting using stranded copper wire salvaged from old mains leads. Four or five strands of wire are twisted together using an old fashioned hand-drill, a number of those twisted groups are then twisted together and the large bundles tied together with thin brass wire. Branches are bent to shape, the fine ends teased out and then trimmed to length. A mix of Polyfilla and PVA glue is splodged over and then the whole lot given a coat of primer. That's where we are right now, colouring the trunk and branches and adding foliage is next month's project.

Most club members had a go on a short Wednesday night.

An example of the bare tree shape possible:

We are attempting to make our trees recognisable species. To begin with we are concentrating on ash and birch, and we don't have room for a fully mature oak. We will need to attempt some oaks but they will need to be half relief trees against the backscene.