Physicsman

No, in true Victorian style, we modellers are certainly NOT amused by any degree of flippancy on these threads. It's chin up, straight face and jolly well on with the show..... And yeh, that's a load of old boll0ck5 for sure!!!! We should demand the return of the groan (sounds like a Swedish sauna scene!!)!!

Excellent question, and yes there's been a hell of a lot of it! I kept a lot of the stone walling when I broke-up the last layout (KL2) and actually re-used about 5 metres of it on here. The original walls near the viaduct path were recycled from KL2. Unfortunately - in my opinion - the new walling is so much better than the old stuff that I couldn't imagine ever using it again. So I'm afraid all the old stuff I've replaced has been binned. 20,000 stones worth - probably 8kg of DAS. The walling around the outside of the layout from station area round to the viaduct remains the "old stuff" (from last May to Seotember). I acknowledge there's a degree of insanity in all of this. I'd have preferred not to have spent 10 weeks re-doing walls (amongst other things), but my rule 1 is that I MUST always try the best I can, however mediocre or good it turns out. So as improvements in technique come along, stuff gets changed. I actually sat for ten minutes this afternoon pondering the running of trains round all of this. Nice, but not my priority by a long shot. Think I'll build the underbridge at the station exit next - DAS brick cladding on a ply skeleton, methinks. J.

Sorry Rob, I HAD to give you a "Funny" when I'd have liked to give you a "Groan".....

Hi Al. Nice to see you on here. There was - for a short time - a "groan" button, but Andy Y decided to remove it. Perhaps people with no sense of humour were offended at receiving one. Personally, I'd be chuffed! Only joking about the Shredded Wheat, though it's amazing what modellers will use in the quest for "realism"!! Jeff

The "water" gel will clear when it has set - this is the 4th "layer", and the last. Other than those things I've not been doing much. Off to cut up some Weetabix packets, use some Shredded Wheat for thatching, patch a few baseboard holes and see if I can find new supplies of ply in the skip.....

The Gill now has "water" in it.....

Replacement walling on the cutting is complete, with all copings fitted. The cows can now safely cross the overbridge with no fear of tripping over blocks of stonework!

Some updates on modelling carried out over the last week or so. The wall to the rear of the station area, leading towards the goods yard, has been replaced....poor thing, it was only 4 months old. More tree making has been on the go, and the area beyond the wall provides the space for a series of 30-40 foot mature trees to "grow". 3 in place at the mo, another couple in the future as the wall extends towards the station entrance at left....

I've just been made aware that I've been voted 3rd in the 2021/22 BRM modelling awards. I wasn't even aware this was happening. So thank you to anyone on here that voted for me. I'm quite taken aback!! EDIT: Looking at the brief details I've been sent, it looks like an Editor's Award. So thanks to Andy York, then!! 😀 😀😀

I've made some changes to the area under the viaduct and I'm working on the gill. Pics of that, probably Monday. In the meantime, another recently processed moon pic from Wednesday, 13th April. The big crater upper middle is called "Gassendi" and is around 100km across.

Edited to include prototype comparison... I'll make this batch the last group of pics for a while. "That" camera angle - looking up at the bottom of the central arches. A stitched pic from 2 images, not quite perfectly aligned. EDIT: Here's the camera angle I referred to, as shown in post 1 of this thread. Followed by the large cutting - taken in natural light at around 4.30 - which brings out the variations in the vegetation colours better than with the usual LED lighting.

I hadn't thought about the scale aspect as the wagons were there more by chance than by planning! But it does put things into perspective. I just wish (oh well, never mind) that I'd had another 2' behind the viaduct to show the structure with a bit more of the landscape around it. Maybe I'll build another viaduct in my living room - DAS bricks, eh? - and do that...... J.

Don't make me jealous!! Already 4 weeks since our journey - we need to do it again.

Good point. To be honest I hadn't noticed the wagons - they'd been pushed out of the cutting I've been working on. I MUST try harder! 🙂 😀😃🙂

Sunrise over Arten Gill..... Jeff

Right, I'm not a great one to sit on here pumping post after post into the thread every time I move a new car, wagon or blade of grass onto the layout (YES, there are some post cravers on this Forum, more fool them....) BUT I couldn't resist these pics. The first 2 are stitched panoramas and the last one is "sunrise over Gill Head". Being panoramas they can be clicked on to open out a fair bit. Ooooh, getting arty-farty in my old age. What next? Anyway, the viaduct roughly aligns north-south with north to the left. So the "sun" rising (a reflection off the Bunker door) is coming from around the ESE direction, corresponding to early March. The tree vegetation doesn't quite match, but....this is "art"..... You'll be expecting to see trains running on the track next. Phew - not in the near future.

A set of pics to (probably not) show what's happening. The hillsides were flocked down to the top of the rocks, allowed to dry and excess hoovered off. The Gill floor was given another coating of a grey-brown acrylic mix. Most of this will be covered in small rocks eventually. A base coat of 2.5mm fibres has just been applied on top of some of the flock. The whiteness of the PVA is still very evident. Another section of walling is also being worked on, but that's for another time.

Progress is being made, but I'm not rushing things. A couple of views of the ongoing "rock saga" with most rocks now "tainted".

Rob, Adrian, thanks for the photos. Any relevant material is inspirational to the build. I thought - as a little break from walls, trees etc - that I'd sort out the rock structure and infill (talus, pebbles and the like). I'll put the "water" in at a later stage to avoid it getting crapped up (I use WS Realistic Water gel). That way I can work out how the vegetation around, and within,the Gill fits in and get it sorted. At least that's the theory. There's always another distraction waiting around the corner to wear out the poor modeller!!

The paint has now dried out, and pleased to see the staining effect still looks ok. Always looks better when wet, sometimes looks very dull and flat when dry.

I've been applying some grey-brown wash onto the cutting walls - a pleasant task after all the hours building the little bu99ers! For a 30 minute aside I decided to give the rock faces in the Gill a bit of a coating. Pics attached - first grey-brown wash..... Looks better wet, but it's going to dry out at some stage!!

John, have a look at the previous page (82), where I re-submitted the post about how I do my grass work, as all the original pics had disappeared. It's dated April 2. I use a Noch Grassmaster and all the fibres are from Noch. I've tried a few different brands but haven't found anything that's as good as them. And having spent over £500 on grass fibres for this layout alone, I had to get it right. Each to their own, of course! J.

3 pics to show that I AM doing something. Walls around large cutting now re-done....just need a spot of paint on them. 90% of what could be replaced has been replaced. Only another 2500 stones to go.

Work is continuing apace, though to the casual observer they'd probably notice little change. So, for the people on here who appreciate an image of the moon, or three, a couple from Saturday night. An 80 minute imaging session generated 140Gb of excellent data, which will take me another few days to process. To put that in perspective, a typical image on here is 2Mb. 140G is 70,000 times larger! And it'll all boil down to just a few images by the time I've sifted through it.

Good to see a lot of the pre-June 21 images are reappearing. Looks like the first 45 pages of this thread might be ok. In which case, some of the gaps after that could be plugged over a period of time. I'll wait another week and see how we stand.