So, in addition to the works on my P4 Stour Valley epic I've been planning for a couple of years now to complete a rebuild/refurbishment of Fen End Pit. The original layout is suffering from 15 year old MDF syndrome and the ends of the baseboards in particular have suffered from a decade on the exhibition circuit. I still really liked the layout and it seems other people do too based on the comments whenever I took it out to shows.

There were also a few nagging design features which I felt I could do better, most notably the 'guitar' board which bolted onto the front of the layout to make the sand pit end wider than the rest of the layout. Also I thought I could produce a better arrangement at the 'works' end, we never really used the fiddle yard for trains and needed some more to keep the operator at this end busy between loads of sand as it takes longer to fill the wagons with the dragline than it does to empty them.

What to do has been mulling in the brain for several years but I realised that there wasn't actually that much wrong with the actual baseboard, in most cases the issue was just with the framing (also MDF) and this appears to be able to break off without (hopefully) causing catastrophic damage. So the idea outlined below was formed, the red bits being the new sections of baseboard. The main works baseboard gets a complete rebuild, this time the conveyor belt with sit within the length of the board rather than bridging two boards, the revolving screen turns to be a right angles to the conveyor and gains a track we can use to park a wagon to collect the oversize reject material. The fiddleyard gets replaced by a new two road engine shed, the plan being that the rear road of the shed will have access through the backscene to smuggle a locomotive out for wheel cleaning.

At the pit end the baseboard widens out to give space for the quarry and this time it is all a single board which we can up-end and the end of a show to clear all the loose sand as we pack the layout up. I've also built a stupidly sharp Hudson point which probably no locomotive will get over on the curved road which will hopefully be used by the fuel tank wagons refueling the dragline.

Several hours of laser cutting later and I now have the new works end board assembled. Construction is very similar to the boards I made for the Stour valley, lots of 6mm ply and tabs and slots. The jigsaw of the surface is a result of a laser cutter which has a maximum bed size of 900x600mm but the joints are pinned by the tabs and slots in the cross members.

Once again I have a, hopefully, suitable level of cross-bracing. I have made one change in the design over the first two Stour Valley boards. I've stuck some copper foil tape on the board surface underneath the cross-bracing to carry the DCC current. I should hopefully just be able to run dropper wires from each rail down to the nearest bit of foil and that should tidy the wiring up a lot.

So I hope you are pleased I've finally got off my behind to actually start this, I'll keep you posted with progress.

David