It was good to have a close look behind the scenes at Chris Nevard's marvellous Brewhouse Quay during Railex, one of the benefits being that I saw the use of bendy MDF for the first time. I'd not knowingly seen this stuff in the flesh, but now that I had an idea what to look for, I quickly found a big pile of sheets in my local B&Q. They must have been staring me in the face every time I'd been in before, of course.

All the scenic modules on the S&D layout employ curved backscenes, with a height of 14" from water-level to the top of the sky. The first one I made, the spring module, uses a containing box of thin MDF, with card sky sheets glued into this box bent into self-supporting curves at the corners. This is fine as far as it goes but it is hard to disguise the joints between the sheets and there's only so much re-working you can do to such a backscene once it's in place, due to its delicate nature.

The winter module was of a similar design, but I later became dissatisfied with the original painted backscene. Knowing that it would not withstand repainting, I layered a sheet of thin, bendy perspex over it and painted a completely new backscene on top of the old one. The perspex backscene is relatively easy to work with and could be repainted as many times as I like. Both the spring and winter modules needed to be kept relatively light in view of the bracketing used to support them.

For the summer module, however, I'd used much heavier duty bracketing (because the boards were deeper, and I never expected to extend the American layout around that part of the room) and so while this heavy bracketing has proven a pain in some regards, it does allow the use of much heavier backscene material. To that end I installed three sheets of bendy MDF, totally nearly 13' in total, with a frontage of 8'. I glued and clamped each sheet before proceeding with the next, taking several days to put all three in place. I then used crack-resistent filler to smooth over the joins, allowing it to dry hard (overnight) before sanding gently down. When all looked good, I applied three layers of white primer. I was ready to start actual backscene tonight but was disappointed to see that hairline cracks had opened up between the sheets, so it was back with the filler. I'll sand it down and re-apply primer, and see how it looks.

Anyway, here's progress to date - lots of nice empty baseboard as we look down the length of the summer module:

Entry of the tracks through the left hand backscene. The lean in the backscene will be corrected once I fix the fascia in place (er, the thing the light goes on - is that a pelmet?). I've left an area under the tracks here which was originally going to be a low-height road bridge but will probably end up being a culvert and stream.

In other news, I spent a few evenings adding SEF flushglazing to these two Bachmann Bulleid coaches. I think the result is an improvement but as always it's a personal thing; while it's true that the vac-formed units will never look as good as precisely fitted window inserts, they are cheap, relatively easy to work with and for my money a definite step-up from thick-walled plastic coach sides. Plus, you get lots of spare bits in the SEF packs. I tend to work on a batch of coaches, put them aside, and then come back and selectively replace the less well done bits. I still have another Bulleid to do in this rake, and an elderly Mainline MK1 in southern green.

Working on these, incidentally, I have been impressed at how easy it is to dismantle the Bulleids. The simple design suggests that they could be good candidates not only for close-coupling mechanisms but also for putting in some coach lighting at some point. I could face doing a short rake of these.

Going back to the spring module, here are a few shots of the attempt to integrate foreground trees and painted backscene, to swallow the shadows from the 3-D trees:

Finally - just before the funny bit at the end of the news with some pandas - a couple of wide-angle shots of the spring and winter modules.

Cheers and thanks for reading.