Hi,

Well it's been a busy few weeks since the last update and Heworth was shown officially for the first time at TINGS in September.

Network Rail Building

One of the last bits of work we did prior to going to TINGS was to make some small changes to the centre board. We'd planned to have a few small buildings either side of the Main Line, to the rear of the layout there would be a small shunting frame and at the front of the layout, there would be a Network Rail building containing switch gear and signalling equipment for the Main Line. The problem we had was that there really wasn't any defined way that this building could be accessed, so that meant that we'd have to install a track to provide access for vehicles.

We also decided that we'd place the building far enough away from the side of the main line so that vehicles could be parked outside. As the existing terrain sloped gently down towards the edge of the running lines this meant that we'd have to cut away some of the banking and install some small retaining walls.

Main ground works done and base colour applied

Blended in a little more, some scatter and weathering applied to the track

Bushes and crash barrier added

Point Heaters

To add a bit more detail to the track side, heaters have now been added to the main line points (circled in red)

Back Scene

One of the things that Heworth has been lacking for a long time is any kind of back scene for the layout. The main problem that we had here was what to do with the curved boards. Pretty early on, we'd discussed the pros and cons of having either an angled or curved back scene and it was always our preference to have one that followed the curves. This does provide for an interesting set of problems, first of which is what material do you use. Standard ply is OK, but you're pushing the limits of it's flexibility and you don't get a great finish to either paint or fix something to without allot of extra work. Flexible ply works quite well, but again, the surface would need allot of work. Flexible MDF seemed to be a great compromise, you could easily form the curves and it had a nice surface to work with, but it was almost impossible to work with once it was cut to size. Any trimming or shaping that needed to be done would just end up destroying it.

In the end, we decided to use Hardboard as a compromise because it's flexible, has a decent finish and you can work it with hand tools without making a complete mess. The downside is that we'd need to be very careful with it once fitted as handling and moisture could be problems in the future. The pictures below show the hardboard being fitted to the modules and being test fitted.

Once the back scene was fitted to the modules, it was time to take it all off again so that it could be decorated. We'd originally decided to paint the sky line, but somebody had seen a diorama that had used a sprayed back scene which had looked really effective so we decided to give that a go. Initially the boards were sprayed with a mixture of blue tones, then white was sprayed over for clouds. This gave us a really effective back scene, but when we fitted the first board to the first module, we found that it was way too bright. After a bit of head scratching and various pictures taken and shared of real sky / clouds, we decided to spray the underside of the clouds with primer to darken them up a little. This worked really well and just lowered the bright colours that we had previously enough to tie them into the rest of the layout.

Curtain

Something else that Heworth had been lacking was a Curtain to hide the underside of the Scenic Boards. We'd decided to use a vinyl banner for the curtain, as it could be easily printed allowing us to design our own signs for the layout. As we'd chosen to paint the front of the layout in BR Blue (RAL 5020), we thought it would be a nice idea to have the layout name printed as if it was a loco nameplate. After a bit of searching around on the web and questions on the forum, we found a font which could be used for the lettering and found the prototypical colour used for the background of the nameplate.

We had a little problem getting the artwork ready as it needed to be sent in a 'ready to print' format, but with a bit of tweaking it was OK and was sent off for printing. As part of the production process the company we used fitted eyelets so we could easily mount it to the front of the layout.

Fitting the banner to the front of the layout

Left hand side complete

All done

Cheers, Mark.