Been slowly - very slowly - reballasting, weathering and adding backscenes.  Typically, I underestimated how much backscene I needed and could have probably made my own using a cracking and very reasonable one man band printer in Barmouth I've used several times for other stuff, but I ended up buying off the peg.

I've had a rethink of the "Old Town" and moved the Hornby Skaledale "courtyard" shops to next to Tudor Row, which works much better.  The space formerly occupied by the lock-ups next to the station will now be filled by an Auhagen pair of modern shops which, being HO, will sit better next to the station and the Bank of Bitch.  I'm hoping the 1960s style of the Auhagen kit will give the ambience of Minnie's brother and station, Perry Barr.

The blue lighting is created using multi-colour LED spots to give a cool, early morning feel.  To the Mk1 eyeball, it is effective, to a Samsung dog and bone, it's a bit teal.

The Old Town is now overlooked by a backscene of blocks of flats.  A lot of smaller Black Country towns have historic shopping areas with tower blocks looming over them.  I think I need to give the shops a bit of a clean.

One thing I have done is repaint the honey stone effect in the Tudor buildings and the TMC/Bachmann "Market Tavern".  I ummed and aard about repainting the two SD mouldings plaster cast Tudor buildings as they had a lovely paint job, but in the end I felt that as you would be most unlikely to find rusty limestone in the Black Country which is outside the "ironstone belt" which gives South Midlands and Lincolnshire it's characteristic hue, I went for it, using a light terracotta brown, followed by an airbrush weathering of sooty black to give a red brick/red sandstone effect.  I'm pleased with the results which give the Old Town a more West Midlands feel

The Old Courthouse viewed from the upper storey of the Solicitors in 2 Tudor Row.  The Moriah Chapel is sans railings, having been taken away for salvage in the war and never replaced. Technically the chapel also bears the name of the family whose bequest funded it's construction, the Careys, so it's official title is the Moriah-Carey chapel.



First bus of the day to Birmingham has no punters, but Black Country folk want nothing to do with Birmingham if they can help it so no surprise there.  A railway van picks up newspapers for delivery locally.  Meanwhile the caring Borough Engineer has erected ped guard railing, so hopefully any bank robbers won't end up under the wheels of a Fleetline.



Backscene now appearing, a combination of an unfeasibly blue sky for the Black Country from ID backscenes, and a nice collection of genuine Black Country factories by "Lineside and Locos", an eBay seller, who used ID to print them.  It gives a nice sense of depth behind the ultra low relief "Aunty Edna's" sweet factory whilst retaining a claustrophobic, densely developed feel to the scenery.

Progress on Wombourne.  Gaugemaster backscene now Spraymounted into place and the temporary wooden platform  put into location.  The idea is the station was on a (fictional) LNWR line to Shrewsbury, connecting there with the LNWR line to Swansea and the Welsh coalfields, providing a more direct line for the LNWR from the Midlands to South Wales, but was closed in 1959 between Shrewsbury and the original Wombourne station.  However, problems with organising rail replacement bus services and a legal glitch led to opponents of closure gaining a successful court injunction to stop the closure process.  So the temporary station, put in place next to an access track to an engineers compound to allow closure of the level crossing whilst the legal arguments roared on, soldiered on for another 40 years until it was finally rebuilt in 2007.  Hence the cheeky graffiti, imploring the saving of the station.  Not by Barbara Windsor, or Barbara Cartland, but of course Barbara Castle.  The graffiti has become something of a local landmark.

The platform just accommodates a two car unit.  In 1966 it was served by a Park Royal railbus transferred in from Derbyshire for a while, by 1970 to 75 it was a Class 122 bubble car, but by 1986 the fight back began, with two car units, newly allocated to Tyseley (it received some 108s in that year) drafted in and through services to Birmingham, reversing in the bay at Wednesford, introduced.  By 1993 the service was integrated into the Birmingham to Hednesford service to become Wombourne-Wednesford-Hednesford, and by 2006 the service was established as an all 2 car Class 150 operation between Rugeley-Birmingham-Wednesford-Wombourne.  The following year the station was rebuilt and the threat of closure finally removed.

the trackway beside the platform will be an experiment in using crackling medium, Agrellian Earth paint, both of which dry to simulate cracked mud/compacted earth, grass tufts and weed-like plants to give the effect of "we really want to close this station".  It's precisely the kind of near death experience most enthusiasts detest and avoid.  I like to trigger such rose tinted romanticists.  We'll see.

The track will be ballasted, I'm waiting on a new supply.  Seriously underestimated how much I would need.  Town planners don't make good quantity surveyors.

The idea for "Wombourne" came about because I needed a track which I could use to connect a "Sprog" to for DCC maintenance, plus I didn't like the idea of giving over so much space to a fiddle yard, so wiring up the bay platform at Wednesford with it's own feed so I could isolate it from the main line to do programming and testing made sense, and based on how entertaining the simple plank to plank "Kings Oak" was, running a variety of stock and trying to keep a timetable going was to operate despite the simplicity, I figured a "layout within a layout" could work and allow me to model something that most would run a mile from.

The Gaugemaster N gauge backscene works well even if it looks nothing like Wombourne!

So tomorrow, pending new ballast supplies, and some more backscenes, I think I'll have a play with the scenery for Wombourne.