Much appreciate the comment re my last blog entry - sound advice and thankyou! I have a metre-long steel straight edge that has proved invaluable when track-laying and it's also handy for slicing up card to make straight platforms.The attached pics show the evolution of the station area and i think the tracks are just about straight enough....

At the early stage, I was anxious to get the platform clearances correct. My island platform buildings are obviously 'Superquick' so that dictates platform width. The passenger footbridge (in 2 sections) was made for a terminus station on a previous layout and effectively dictates a 3/2-road configuration (this is the third layout it's been used on). It's built from scratch using as a base a pair of 'plastruct' girders with a slice of plasticard as an internal, hidden spacer. The glazed portion on top is made from CD jewel cases (these respond to plastic solvent really well) with micro-strip overlay for the glazing bars. The roofs are simply plasticard painted to look a bit like felt covering.The supporting stair-cases are fabricated from mounting card and brick paper with scraps of Airfix stairs at the lower ends. Platforms are built up from mounting card with the edging stones scribed using a very hard pencil. The white line along the platform edge is achieved by scribing the surface a few mm from the edge with the back of a Stanley knife blade such that when carefully painted, the paint runs into the groove, but no further, giving a clean edge. The main building is built almost entirely from mounting card and brick paper and has undergone a few modifications over the years as it's been adapted to successive layouts, although storage during house moves has taken a bit of a toll (the camera is hyper-critical).

One of the pics shows the rough form of the over-bridge that now forms the scenic break between the station and the storage loops. This is made up of plywood sides and base founded on wooden blocks bodged to achieve the optimum height. The bridge girders are scratch-built from differing thicknesses of plasticard whilst the bridge abutments are made using a suitable thickness of strip-wood, easily picked up at DIY shops. The side-walls are topped with balsa cut to look like capping stones. - more of this perhaps later.

Finally, two pics showing the 'London end' of the station as it currently is with a bit of action. One shows a Crosti 9F taking the "London" branch with a loaded coal train whilst "County of Montgomery" runs in from the "Banbury" line with the Swansea-York. The other shows a Hall (Hornby Railroad, but a lovely model) on the Grimsby Fish passing another Hall (Bachmann) on a parcels working. "Hinton South" box controlling the junction is from a card kit.

P.S. I started this blog having been a visitor to the site for a long time and having learned a lot from anonymously reading the contributions of others. The last time i belonged to a model railway group was when i lived in Hull in the late 70s, just starting out with my first 'proper' layout (all of 7'6" by 5'), and i learned a huge amount from the guys at HMRS. Since then, it's been a solo effort and with one exception, all DIY and trial and error (often the latter). I'll come back to the exception in time ....