Woodland Scenics Foam Putty is a wonderful material. It fills. It's light. It's finger-friendly. It paints up nicely.

So I've built up the area around the turntable with some foamcard and the foam-putty. And various brown paints.

The fencing around the side seems a sensible H&S approach, and I just had a pack of the white flexible fencing around that I'd seen going cheaply on ebay.

I'll eventually apply various floor-covering materials, i've a brown "flock" that I quite like to use for the 'rough ground' effect it has, and a variety of static grasses and Busche flowers, so don't expect the ground to look like this forever.

The layout has a pair of Kato re-railer/crossing sections at the rear-right. These were added as a practical nature to help get the track the Correct distance apart; at the other end of the back is the scissors cross-over which does the job on that side.

I grabbed some Peco crossing-gates and with some judicious application of more Foam Putty I arranged the gates in a nearly-sensible position.

As you can see the concrete fencing has run along the rear of the layout. I've decided against retaining walls or half-relief houses (which I should have decided upon BEFORE buying sufficient Metcalfe kits) and I'll just run a road down here to the Gasworks, and forward from the level crossing towards the other buildings.

I'm not worried about having too many Metcalfe kits; I love building them; but they really are a little large when compared to the resin building ranges; and as I've committed to the Liddle End gasworks (and church and crossing-keepers house) I didn't want to overpower them and surround them by the Metcalfe housing.

I like the way you can age many railway layouts by the buildings on it. The 1960s and 1970s were clearly the Age Of Airfix, and you must wonder at the sheer number of railway buildings they must have sold at that time; almost every layout that wasn't completely scratch-built had one or more Airfix kits; I find them very nostalgic and have a number on our Lockdown Layout. Then you get the 2000s and suddenly we're in the Age Of Metcalf; the same thing - it seems that Most layouts have one or more of their structures on. Again, I don't mind them, I love building them as they are clearly the pinnacle of cardboard modelling; however being pre-coloured you do get, I feel, a bit too much conformity that you didn't get "back in the old days".