Blog- IanLister's Blog.... - The calm before the tracklaying storm......

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Hi

In between hundreds if not thousands of long dog walks and a certain amount of preparing for Christmas (which I believe is going to be excellent in Cornwall, one reason being that the less savoury elements of my family, namely my brother's inlaws, will be a very long way away; they don't even know where we are.....), I've managed to lay the trackbed (1.5mm balsa) and stick down the track plan for board 1.....the distillery:

 

 

 

The following 2 pics should give an idea of the layout of track and buildings. The black dots show the location of uncoupling magnets:

 

 

 

 

And finally a shot showing the board residing on the very comfortable kingsize bed in the motorhome ( I move it at night, otherwise the puppy would curl up on it):

 

 

 

The picture on the back wall is Dunstanburgh Castle in Northumberland, one of our favourite places for lots of reasons.

 

A couple of photos showing the kind of distillery architecture I'm hoping to recreate:

 

 

 

 

And finally, the trackplan for the complete layout in its final form after the revision to the branchline and station layout I described in an earlier post. The distillery is at the far left, or northwestern end:

 

 

 

The Mallaig branch shown on the photos is close to the back edge of the board; there is, however, room for the waterfront road and an assortment of low relief buildings as a backdrop, including the Station Hotel, a couple of smokehouses for the fishing industry, a cooper's factory and various local and harbour-related small businesses. The land rises to the west, so the entrance road into the distillery crosses the line by a bridge, which, together with the fairly substantial buildings of the distillery, creates a convenient exit point to the western fiddle yard.

 

As I write this, 50 metres of 0.5mm x 2mm walnut strip for sleepers and turnout timbers are winging their way to me from somewhere clever enough to be able to cut it accurately from walnut trees; how on earth do they do that? I used to have enough trouble with rough sawn garden fencing......

 

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