Steve with the Hat

Cheers Shaun! Have a good one too !! Steve

Here are a few more shots of the layout to close-out the year: Bursley station by night Loop Line Steam line-up (4F from Santa on the right) The pot-bank is taking shape Overall view I'm happy with the progress we've made in 12 months, plans are afoot to finish the layout quickly in the new year, we will then start thinking about our next project. Cheers for all the support, help and advice. Happy New Year to all!

Great modern image scenes Dave - that Javelin looks the business !!

The lad had been less interested in the layout of late, I couldn't work it out until I realised that he couldn't see further than the fiddleyard!! . So we have removed the whole thing and now the lad can see right over to the station - Success! I had really wanted a fiddleyard to make a 'proper' layout but with our configuration it just would not work - at least we can see the trains running round now. Elsewhere on the model we have installed our new platform, building and yard lights (pics to follow soon) and we are cracking on with our bottle kilns. We are building a rail served pottery factory now to replace our current 'generic' goods yard. hope everyone has a great holiday and gets time to do some modelling!

Thanks for the detailed explanation of this system Mikkel. As a novice all these different systems can mean little unless you actually see them illustrated. Cheers again and have 5 stars

Is that part of another satellite in the background there? I hope you pose your loco's behind pics you're sending to ESA

Brilliant! I never saw this one on RMWeb3 - cheers for posting the pics, the pub looks particularly good, more please!

great stuff JZ, that coal looks much better, did you seal it all up with PVA?

We have decided to develop our wooded area by adding a pot bank and maybe some terrace houses, this will add to the Potteries atmosphere and better identify the urban setting of the layout. I've formed a papier-mache shell around a suitable bottle, then coated this with DAS clay rolled out to 4mm thickness. Once dry I sanded the finish to reduce the lumps and slid the model off the bottle. Back on the bottle for marking out the horizontals which was achieved by using an elastic band which matched the width of the brick courses. Last night saw me marking up as many verticals as I could stand! A donated church will be adapted to give us some workshop buildings. the wooded area is to the top left on this image

me too - another happy customer here I'm looking at the goods area on our roundy layout and thinking a shed would've been nice

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hi pieman, to attach photos you can use a regular img link as you would in a post, or click the add gallery button to attach a whole gallery to the blog cheers steve

A small entry today showing our latest projects, Originally budget had meant as much of the layout as possible needed to be scratchbuilt from freely available materials. While progressing with my modelling I now realise this approach is part of the hobby I enjoy immensely and I will try to finish the whole thing without buying one sheet of embossed plasticard! We are getting on towards adding small details and tidying everything up to a higher standard. With that in mind I decided to see if I could bash up a fence with concrete posts. A strip of mountboard was cut to the correct lengths, s then hardened with CA glue. Once dry the post end was carved, stuck to a drawing pin and 4 tiny holes drilled. A spool of 4lb line (from the bargain bin at the tackle shop) was then cut to length and 4 strands passed through the posts. The line is glued at both end posts and given a coat of rusty acrylic. The bases will need some scenic camouflage and the paint on the wire touching up now its in place but overall quite pleased for ??1 outlay and an evenings work. Did we take a moment to see how the fence could be improved? Of course not! Enthusiasm drove us onto the next project - A bottle kiln for the still undeveloped corner of the layout. I have spent quite a while drinking various bottled beers and ciders in the sole hope of finding one that looked like a bottle kiln. The otherday I found some Aspells which seemed to match our needs. A coating of pva papier mache and then a good thickness of DAS was rolled out and applied to the bottle former with more pva. We are now at the sanding stage to give a nice smooth finish before the brick scribing begins. so thats about it for now, more updates on the kiln to follow, heres a shot of our goods shed while you wait

the toilets free now, tho I'd give it a min .....

Really like this layout, I'll be keeping up with your progress James

its a great model missy, you obviously have really good finescale skills, still, its very reassuring to hear that your electrics are dodgy! ;P are you wanting a photo backscene?

Hi all, As a first post, a recap of where me and my lad got to after ten months working on the layout. Starting at Xmas 2009 we embarked on creating our son his first model railway. He had acquired an interest in trains when visiting his 'grandma by the seaside' for holidays where grandad had an exhibition standard n gauge setup in the spare room. Using a starter set from the Argos sale and a few trackpacks we got a basic trackplan going with a double loop and a siding. This was enough for playing trains over Xmas but it was clear that a more detailed plan was required. A CJ Freezer plan book from grandad got us started and then I found NRM and RMWeb - what a great couple of resources for new modellers. I spent many hours researching and started to get a rough idea of what we wanted so a box of flexitrack and on we charged. It now occurs we had no idea what we were doing and a few months rather than weeks research are in order before starting such a project. The plan we had settled on was still little more than a 'train set'. Once the track was temporarily fixed down with drawing pins it was clear that we needed something more realistic in order to keep my interest in building and give longevity to the layout for the boy. So it was that we settled on the plan you see here, a fiddleyard, station and station goods yard make up the elements of a double track 'disguised' oval. Track was ballasted with aquarium sand, scenics were added using homemade materials, recycled tile grout and HBL. Buildings are kits or scratchbuilt from mountboard and printouts/DAS. Most of the scenery has had a first pass now to give a completed feel to the model for Kaneda. However there are many areas which will need more detail or re-doing. Overall I'm really happy with where we are, which is in part due to the encouragement and advice of the members here, and of course plenty of beginners luck!

I had always wondered what the books and articles meant by "points are operated by dpdt switches" so that last shot is really useful cheers. Any chance of of seeing how you connect them up underneath? or a how to in the guides section (when you have the time) regards Steve