To this point in the process, Lyghtondown has been rather two dimensional. Flat, even.

"Hardly a surprise", would be fair response.  At the end of the last blog entry the Management and I had got as far as playing trains on a flat rectangular area of plywood with a rectangular hole in the middle. I don't wish to minimise the mile stone that represented, we had a great evening unwrapping the toys at last.  But in real terms this much less than half way, there's a lot still to do.

What the railway always required (an indeed all layout require) is a third dimension: height.  The railway needs bumps, contours, shape and ultimately some context in which the railway "paraphernalia" would sit in. Something to make it believable.  The best way of getting some of that third dimension going was to start planning the hills, and when this began something really became obvious: Corners do not look right.

For a layout this size it seems like it has quite a lot of corners, and from most angles when looking at the layout (rather than looking into your hands ) there's a corner making its presences felt (either on the inside or the outside of the boards).  This is predominantly caused by the scenic area being maximized by forming a "U" shape round the centre access hole.  It was inevitable, but how to mitigate this.

The answer was hardly rocket science, but did require additional in-fill boards to be fabricated:  The back scene behind the scenery will be (more or less) continuously curved from the extreme left to the extreme right.  Something like this:

So the blue line represents the outline planning permission for the back scene, and the turquoise bits the new boards.  I picked up some flexible plywood to assist with the fabrication and the back scene itself.  Strange stuff is all I can say.  I am happy with it for the more structural pieces, but for the back scene I am having second thoughts.  More of that another time.

I could try to describe the build process from here forward, but photos during fabrication are better. So:

Infill corners just made and sitting roughly where they would be placed.

Then, and a little frustratingly later in the process, the corners are fitted and the "backs" of the hills fixed and glued into place.

Left:

Right:

Finally the whole thing:

So this set the basic outline of the hills along the back.  The next job is to fill in the hills.  So, voila!

... and ...

The building insulation foam was used to fill in the hills.  One 2.44m x 1.22m x 60mm sheet provided enough material for everything, just a pain trying to remove all the foil before gluing it into place.

That's probably enough of this for the moment.  Next time finishing the hills and bringing the blog pretty much up to date.