Zombie Hands by Will Vale, on Flickr

Just a quick update to say that I'm still plugging away at the layout despite work, distractions, and minor disasters. No decent pics yet but I have done the following:

* Melted some track and distorted the track bed.

* Painted all the rocks

* Made a lighting pelmet (which works) plus brackets to fix it to the layout, and primed and sanded it.

* Added ground cover to most of the layout.

* Weathered and installed the bridge (more-or-less, it still needs a central pillar!)

* Started getting some trees ready.

* Made the river bed.

The first really got me down - I was using a lamp to dry some Klear which had run off the scenery onto the ballast, and forgot about the inverse-square law. Six inches away - no problem. Two inches away - melty mess. The sleepers softened and the ballast swelled pushing everything out of whack. Luckily I caught it before it got any worse.

I was able to dig out the ballast, cut through some of the sleeper web, and reshuffle them. I also had to slice off a few chairs. There's still a bit of gauge narrowing but I don't think re-laying that track is a realistic option, and both my 10-coupled locos run through it happily pushing or pulling stock. I eventually managed to remove the hump in the MDF track bed by running a long M2 bolt through both it and a very big "washer" (MDF offcut) under the layout. With careful tightening this brought the hump down to the level of having to look for it if I wanted to find it. I'm glad this worked - watching stock go up and down over the hump was pretty silly.

It's been reballasted since, and with a bit of weathering it'll be OK, but it was a miserable afternoon afterwards, as you can probably imagine

The last thing on the list is where the awesome combination of paint and clay (I kneaded tube acrylic into white DAS-type clay to colour it) turned my hands into Night of the Living Dead.

The biggest worry at the moment is priming, sanding and painting all the exterior surfaces. That takes a while and I don't know if there's any fine weather to work with this week. We'll see I guess.

Scenery continues in any bits of spare time I can find. Detailing is looking unlikely. 5 days to go!