Greetings.

Nothing very exciting at the moment I'm afraid!

Seeing as I've been running stuff on Little Midland for a few days now without any power hiccups, I decided to take the plunge tonight and apply some paint to the sleepers and the rails.

Out came the airbrush, but then I realised I would have to brush paint because:

a) I haven't got a hose to connect my new airbrush to the air cannister ( no compressor as yet); and

b)My old airbrush has a bottle which requires to be filled with far too much paint - one good reason for getting a gravity feed with cup.

Anyway, I got out the paintbrushes instead, and it wasn't as onerous a job as I half-expected.

I am reasonably happy with the result, though it is a little messy in places ( for that matter, so is the track construction, so...! ) ; after a bit of retouching of sleepers, once the ballast eventually goes down I think it will look fine.

The only downers now are that some of the Easitrac appears to have lifted from the PVA in a couple of places, Is this, I wonder, because the board has been lying around without ballast for a week or two - the room is not very variable in terms of temperature?

Also the converted Union Mills 0-6-0 goods engine refuses to pass through the crossover cleanly. I tinkered with the track last weekend to try to improve matters, with only a little improvement. As both the scratchbuilt 0-6-0 goods tank and the 2-4-0 + tender seem to pass through, I have concluded that the crossover is not in fact the problem, and will have to go back and look at ithe 2F on a future occasion.

Regards,

Chris