Tweedale - Slaghill Low
In the past few months since the last update, the main progress on the layout has been the addition of scenery in the Slaghill area. The photo below shows the shuttle railbus for Poshington waiting at the new Slaghill station...
Those of you who remember the old layout may have noticed that while the original Slaghill station was perched on a viaduct this new one is at ground level. To get around the discrepency I'm reasoning that there were two stations in Slaghill, built by rival railway companies in the olden days, before being amalgamated under the Tweedale Railway banner. To distiguish this station from the former high level one, it has been named Slaghill Low (pronounced Slaggy Lur by the locals).
This overall view of the layout shows that scenery has now been added to two out of the three track boards depicted in the last blog post. Due to current difficulties in getting hold of materials, some of the larger constructional jobs that I would have liked to have completed, like baseboard tops, backscenes and layout lighting, have been defered until later. No matter, there are plenty of other jobs that can be done instead, just not in the orderly manner planned.
Zooming in on the relevant area...
The combined length of these two sections (you can see the join near the signal box) is about 4'6". The knobs along the fascia are attached to wooden dowels for operating points. In the foreground is the junction section, where the lines from Upper and Lower Tweedale converge. The loco siding, situated in the fork, is used to stable the Slaghill shunter overnight, and refresh the steam loco that brings in the goods from Lower Tweedale during the day. The track leading off-scene at the far right currently terminates in a fiddle siding but will eventually be extended to Poshington and the coast. An extra siding has been added at the back of this section to serve a factory, but for the benefit of current operations is temporarily standing in as Poshington goods yard, for which a storage shed and coal heap have been provided but not glued down.
Moving on...
The actual station area is confind to this 2'6" long section, and consists of three sidings arranged in the Inglenook fashion. The local shunter, a Bachmann 03, can be seen pottering in the sorting yard behind the station. The bridge in the background is supposed to represent a part of the high level line mentioned earlier.
The water tower is reputed to have been built by Italian POWs, which perhaps explains its resemblance to the decrepit example that Google shows standing in the port of Livorno here. I ought to add that the model was actually drawn up from an image grabbed several years ago and was better lit than the current Google view. As there is a more useful water tower located at the loco siding, this one may get moved elsewhere later.
A backscene will hide the woodchip wallpaper in due course, and there is a little space behind the boundary wall for some low relief buildings, which I think will probably be needed to add more interest along the back. My initial ideas of confining scenery to just that concerned with the railway are being gradually eroded.
Here we are back at the station, and it looks like there's another soot storm approaching...
In order to test out different ideas for the sky background, I painted up some boards in different shades that could be slipped along the back to try out for effect. This one is in black, which certainly makes the models 'pop', and I quite like the novelty of it, but it's probably not something I'd want to stare at for years to come.
The group of industrial buildings next to the station were another Google find, this time from Moscow. Sorry, I've lost the link, and life's too short to trudge around the city looking for it again. The attraction was the pleasing assortment of shapes. I have no idea of their purpose. Although the station here acts as a terminus for passenger trains, the intention is to extend the line in the foreground over a level crossing to a steel works.
By the way, the character in the blue coat, red scarf and zapata moustache is Tweedale's 'standard man'. A lot of the layout's buildings are just drawn up freehand on card without measurement, and it is his job is to inspect door clearances, ceiling heights and so on for 00 accessibility.
Cheers, Alan.
Edited by awoodford
Restored lost images
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