I suppose it had to happen, I've eventually sucumbed to the r-t-r market.....................and it's great! I've bought a couple of Bachmann 16t minerals for the beginnings of the railway side to 'Grime Street'. It's going to be very basic, just a pair of sidings on show with possibly a 3 road storage yard to the rear, it'll give me the option of sunting a few wagons about though and it is very much 'just' an adition to the tram side of things.

The couple of sidings have been layed with SMP track and a SMP plastic point kit and sprayed a matt brown, ballasting next with woodland scenics ash ballast, years since I did any ballasting, off to see my mate the chippie to scrounge some cascamite........................if they've not banned the stuff in the intervening years.

Pic showing the sidings

Meanwhile, as time permits the scribing continues, it's surprisingly therapeutic, but does get somewhat mind numbing after a while, in 'real life' I put yards of the things down, fortunately that's not what I'm doing at the moment, I really don't think I could cope with laying them all day and then come home to scribe the bl***y things!

I've got to put the plates in to cover the tie bars on the points before over plastering, then the pavements will be added from another layer of plaster and scribed, but it's getting there....

This is a bit of a late update all this stuff was done a while since, I've been in Bremen and Hamburg for the last few days, I've a pile of photos from Miniatur Wunderland if anyone wants to see them? (I've also got some from the Reeperbahn, but you'll not be interested in them, ahem) I thought M.W. was very well done, not really to my modelling tastes, but viewing it from the demographic it's aiming for, quite stupendous, anyway, anyone wants some pics just ask and I'll stick a pile up in another blog entry.

Next proper entry will show some of the results of my resin casting, the masters of various parts are well underway, moulds of some parts produced and the odd casting done, I'm really enjoying doing this stuff and can see me doing quite a bit of casting of parts for myself in the future............