After quite a long time fiddling around with ballast it seemed a good idea to ring the changes and have a go at some scenery.

As the tunnel portal looked quite good I figured, why not make some progress on this area and start to blend it in with the (currently) flat MDF board on which the station throat sits.

The station throat is on quite a steep gradient; long story, but the fiddle yard below has plenty of room to reach into!

Basically I wanted to disguise this gradient a bit and some kind of view blocking embankment seemed to fit the spec.

Enter the expanding foam!

With help from my young assistant who doesn't really "get" model railways, but knows a good "making and doing" project when she sees one (the alternative was swatting for this week's spelling test ), we set to with cutting up bandages and plastering them into position.

I've subsequently added a layer of plaster and plan to paint and add scatter.

Here's a photo of progress to date. Looking forward to cracking on with this project tomorrow!

Back to work just now.

Version 1 of my scenery (above) failed to acheve quite what I wanted - a railway within the landscape. Around the platform ends it looked as if the landscape had been plonked on top of the baseboard.

The main reason for this was that the expanding foam had a uniform thickness as the basboard climbed towards the station. Imagine a hedge and you've got the idea.

So, I took a knife to the foam and carved through, making the foam "fade" (roughly) into the baseboard;see below.

Working on the scatter just now. And then off to get more expanding foam to tackle the hill which is anything but a "railway in a landscape".