Entry posted by buffalo
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I've made steady but slow progress on the baseboards over the last month or two. The boards are made from Knauf SpaceBoard extruded polystyrene which comes in 1200 x 500 x 52.5mm sheets, though it seems they are getting increasingly difficult to obtain (see this thread). End plates were made from 9mm ply and fitted with bolts and dowels from C&L. The front and back facing is 4mm ply. The foam pieces were glued together, and to the plywood, using the non-solvent indoor variety of "No More Nails". Being designed for indoor use, this stuff dries very slowly in cold and damp weather and, as I was working in the garage, there have been long periods over the last couple of months when little progress could be made.
The entire layout can be seen in the above photo. In the foreground is the goods yard at the western end of the station. This section up to the bridge is 800mm long and is intended to be a lift-out piece over the doorway of the railway room. The next board is the station section and is 1270mm long by 610mm wide. Now that the messy landforming task has been completed, these two boards have had a 4mm ply track bed cut to shape and fitted and have now been brought indoors for further work.
The final board, at 1390mm long, covers the area from the signal box to the eastern bridge, including the branch to the colliery. I still need to do some fiddling with the Templot plan to get an acceptable minimum radius on the curved double slip before finalising the shape of the track bed. Once that's done, this board will also move indoors.
I described the necessary compression of the plan in an earlier entry. Whilst we often discuss horizontal compression, I've not seen much mention of the vertical aspects of such scaling. Camerton is dominated by the Old Pit batch at the rear of the layout area, and I've tried to keep this close to scale height even though its length is reduced to about 70% of the original.
Bridges, of course, need to be very close to scale height and this often leads to quite implausible gradients on approach roads on some layouts. At the front of the layout there is a road linking the two bridges. At the real Camerton, this descended to track level and had a more or less flat section over the middle third of its length. In order to fit this in without excessive gradients, I've had to reduce this flat section almost to nothing. The road gradient at the goods yard end is perhaps a bit on steep side as this section is much more heavily compressed than the rest of the layout. Fortunately, though, the 80% compression of this area leaves the station approach from the far side of the bridge with an acceptable slope.
Finally, for today, track laying has commenced on the two boards that have been brough indoors. The above photo shows the first length along the temporarily fitted platform. The incongruous collection of stock is just what happened to be close at hand and fitted with P4 wheels 
In line with the prototype, the platform line and loop will be layed with inside keys simply by reversing the Exactoscale GWR chairs. Of course, the chairs aren't exactly right, but they do go some way towards representing the appearance of this long-lived feature at Camerton. The original Hallatrow to Camerton section was laid in this form, whereas the S&C work, new sidings, and the line beyond the platform towards Dunkerton were laid with conventional chairs in 1907-10.
Nick
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11
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