JonPotter

A couple of hours testing today and everything is good (apart from some very dirty wheels and troublesome Kadee's which have been resolved!). Will continue to test a bit further before fixing the backscene and buildings & then starting on the ground cover. I was originally intending on getting the ground cover mostly done tomorrow, but will test a bit further first I think.

Thanks guys. Agreed re 4 weeks going to go quickly (especially as now basically three!) but the deadline should keep me focused. I hadn't come across Croft Depot before but it really is lovely. A bit of progress yesterday - have now sorted and fixed lighting (which required a slight change to the backscene board) and also cut away some of the foamboard and put down a bit of papier mache. Also noticed that the foamboard under a section of the track wasn't flat (being board that had travelled a bit) and wagons ran away down into a dip - not ideal! So it's had to come up and be packed, but now complete. Next step will be to test a bit more rigorously, then start with the proper scenics - most of the bits are now in stock.

Thanks very much for all of the comments! Re the Tim Horn baseboards - yes, definitely. I would not use them for a big project purely because of cost, but for photo box style layouts they're great, very impressed. Over the past few days I've been focusing on 16mm but have made some more progress on this too. Some trestles have been put together, and I've added some shelves and now painted the fiddle yard board. Also added a small two pin plug to provide the power between the two; I had been using fishplates previously. Also now ordered lots of the required missing bits - photo backscene, LED lights, some wall to make garden boundary around the cottage etc - so that I can really crack on with the scenery next week.

Having sold off my 009 layouts Plas Halt (plashalt.weebly.com) and Dinas Junction, and mostly finished my new 16mm garden railway following house move (vwhr.weebly.com), in December I thought it was about time I built a small layout to play with at home, and so Keats Sidings was born. It is a non-specific small goods yard set and is not trying to be too era specific, to cover 1950's through to 1970's stock. Structurally the layout is a 3'x1' Tim Horn baseboard with a short fiddle yard knocked up from 12mm ply. This is a bit under 2' in length to fit in a set space within the house, and is just a single piece of track (perhaps to be replaced by casettes, hence is set a bit lower) with room to store locos & stock etc. The trackplan is simple, with three sidings fed by two Peco points operated by Cobalt point motors. Either DC or DCC are used (primarily DC). THe attached photos show progress thus far - the one with the Class 24 being an up to date photo. I now have four weeks to scenic it before it's due to appear at a local exhibition in March.

Thanks very much Chris

Lovely stuff and inspirational for something I’m working on. Have you used Magnets for the Kadees (if so, what) or do you manually operate?