I have now finished the diorama for the Hotel/Large manor house (haven't decided which yet) and it is now in it's place next to the fiddle yard, which has now been extended to six tracks , plus a short one for a Railcar
AS mentioned in another entry the church diorama has now been added
Work has also been done on the Gasworks and the wood
I 'm in the process of planning my winter job whi
I've started work on the layout after the hot summer. with work continuing on the gasworks and automation with Rocrail
I've now managed to automate things, so that a loco with 2 coal trucks leaves the storage siding and proceeds to the gasworks, where it stops. I have prorammed into rocrail a simulated switch, which stops the loco until it has been uncoupled and the gasworks points set manually, when the switch is set to go (green). The computer runs the next schedule which is to return the
With the changes to the layout I had a space to fill at the far end under the window.
Then I read "Gas Lane" article in the Hornby Magazine Nov 2009.
So this is my take on it
The shed holding the purifier and washer is scratch built and I'm awaiting bits to finish the roof
View of the retort house with it's coal pile, which took ages to get right, I'm still in the process of the building the coke stage
Very much work in progress as you can see
Will write up
I had a corner of the layout to fill, so i decided to build a viaduct on a curve.
Again as before it was built as a module in my garage and then moved into the house
The viaduct is built with a plywood shell and then covered in wills coarse stone sheets, with slater's plasticard for the arches
I've found that you can use a warm soldering iron to melt the coarse sheets on the joins to hid them
The watermill is from the wills craftsmaster kits
When I revised the size of the layout I realised that the area behind the station
No longer looked right and I wanted the corner to be a curve
All of this is built as a module so it was relatively easy to change to
The station building is built around a perspex shell which gives it strength and provides the windows
A view of the building which is dropped into a cutout in the station platform
I've still got to fit a station canopy
Well after a great deal of thought, I have decided that I will use tortoise point motors for the remaining 8 points.
So I ordered one to try out, and have now fitted it. Can't believe I didn't do this before, So much easier to fit than a seep and no more erratic switching of the point frogs with the seep switch.
Now just need to finance the rest of the tortoise motors and the NCE switch 8 decoder
A lot of the scenery work is done by building modules in the garage and then adding them to the layout, it reduces the amount of mess and keeps my wife happy
This is the tunnel module, which sits in the corner of the layout, it hides the exit for the shuttle train which runs back and forth to the station, on the branch line
The pub on top of the hill is a wills craftmaster kit
The next two pictures are how it sits on the layout, the walls are made using wills coarse
The layout is in a bedroom which used to be part of the attic, which the previous owner had installed.
When we first moved into the house, my wife also had her piano in the room.
This restricted the space available and I to build the storage loops under what used to be the eaves.
Which mean the layout was about 2ft off the floor and I could only have 3 storage loops.
I have since negoiated to have the piano moved out on to landing and now have the room to myself other that for an old settee,
