Leaderboard

Three weeks to go by Will Vale, on Flickr As requested, a few photos of progress in a sort of "where are we now" sort of way. Afraid I didn't pose any stock on them. Above you can see the whole layout, with two big jobs remaining - the rockwork in the right foreground (from where the stag is alleged to have leaped) and the groundwork around the bridge. The big things I've been doing this week were carving the rocks at the right, and making the road. The pavements are thin styrene cut to shape freehand using rubbings of the edge of the road to get the shape, and drawing a line parallel to this by moving a thin spacer along following the first line. That was quite a fiddle, it took the best part of a day and a half to mark, cut, install and paint it all. The paint is grey primer as on Whitemarsh, which will get weathered in due course. I also need to do the markings :gulp: I think I mentioned before that I made the rock shed - I painted that up this week as a bit of light relief. It's supposed to be blockwork but my attempts at drawing the blocks with a white pencil were, shall we say, less than accurate. I've painted it such that they are mostly erased, then I went back and added course lines with a propelling pencil in key places. This is the first time I've seen it in close-up and I think it mostly works, but maybe I should do some more of the neat block marks on the columns where the drybrushing hasn't done much to erase the white lines?? I really need to stop messing around filling and re-carving and get some brown on the landscape so I can see what it looks like - the reason I'm holding off is that the surface coat makes carving harder, so I want to get it as nice as possible before taking that step. Off out now to try and track down some fluorescent fittings to make a lighting rig - a bit more professional than previous efforts, maybe the "I disapprove of badly-lit exhibition layouts" crowd will be appeased. .. [Oops - duplicate pic. Now fixed!]

Your shadows should probably look less strong when there's ambient lighting - Cully looks pretty awful under solely it's own light but is suitably softened by room/hall lights. So you should be OK Will.

This is looking great Will...I love those covered structures to protect the track?...reminds me of the last Bond movie where the road version has the Aston taking a battering... Its gonna be fab seeing a train just passing thru'...

I had to have a quick go with the light fitting I bought - this is a non-mechanically-sound installation using masking tape to attach the pelmet, and to attach the light fitting to the pelmet... But it's certainly bright - this was taken in a nearly-dark room. The shadows on the mountains are a bit strong - the pelmet is 5cm in front of the layout - but I think that will probably be OK since it's framing rather than a focal point. I'm waiting on another, longer, fitting which will daisy-chain with this one to fill the length of the pelmet.

one of the jobs this week is a Martin Finney LSWR low roof van kit Dia 1410 & as i do not normally build wagons i have put this build in My Blog so far i have got the chassie to a rolling stage & there are 26 parts to it the build is taking a lot longer than it takes me to build a coach as the kit Can build to any of 3 Diagrams which can have any of 5 brake types & 2 axle boxes so just finding the part takes longer than fitting it the one i am building is to dia 1410 fitted with morton brakes & panter axle boxes 001 by Mozzer models, on Flickr 002 by Mozzer models, on Flickr 003 by Mozzer models, on Flickr