Hello again,

No more Metcalfe models for now, they are a pleasant distraction, however I have been spending some time on a Faller kit - see below. The more relevant news for Northumberton is the installation of the station board with tracks and wiring plus the turntable and its adjacent tracks. I'm using a Heljan turntable code 89121 but I did acquire this several years ago when the DCC version first became available, I was shocked to see the current price of this and would possibly rethink the loco yard if I had not already purchased this. It is nicely made but will benefit from some weathering down later (taking care to avoid the "rack" mechanism). 

Firstly then the station area, fortunately this is contained on its own board which I was able to mount in my folding bench for easy access.

Below the station area undelay in place prior to track laying

Track laid and burnt umber undercoat applied

Underside showing the wiring (much easier than trying to work from below).

The turntable in position awaiting exit tracks.

The access and exit tracks were held up as I made the mistake of thinking that the bridge track was code 75 fine scale and had purchased a code 100 to code 75 convertor and some track, of course the bridge track is actually code 83 so alternative track convertor and track have now been purchased and will be fitted ASAP.

Now I did mention that Faller kit, well I'm taking a very large chunk of artistic licence here and have decided to use Faller 130385 "Falkeneck" as a representation of Cragside which is a national Trust property near to me.  So here is a shot of Cragside I took recently, admittedly you need to see more images of Cragside to get the idea but you can always take a look here: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/north-east/cragside. 

and here is the Faller kit that I hope to use, recoloured to match the above and will be named Cragington!

More views of my progress with this next time. I visited my local model shop, J J Models in Morpeth today and found a nice set of black smith figures in the Scenecraft range together with an Oxford diecast MGTC which would look good running on my yet to be installed Magnorail roads. I have an idea for a scratch built smithy in the future using high density foam stonework.

Next task is to install all the code 83 track in the loco yard and ballast. When complete I will be starting a long testing session and hope to create a new video to accompany that.

Cheers for now!