Whitemoor is handy in that it's a fen prototype with a bridge as a view block. The new incarnation of the yard is even better in this respect since significant earthworks have been done to build a cycle path on the west side of the bridge which runs parallel to the yard throat.

I tried to rough in the embankment with Styrofoam initially, but it wasn't a good fit - the real thing is very artificial in form (it's not just an earth bank) and I took it out and used straight-cut 10mm foam board instead. This works much better and makes it possible to have the sharp corners and discontinuous slopes of the real thing. I have a piece of 3mm board cut out for the path surface, which is just thin enough to form the short transition curves without kinking, and also the road surface. I've cut it a couple of mm wider than the bridge deck so it bows up in the middle as per Norwood Road, though this all needs bracing up still.

With the framework in place I had a look at the retaining wall. I thought initially it was some kind of concrete product like Criblock but after going through the pictures again (several times) and finding some more construction pictures it's actually a lot more interesting than that. The wall in question is the one on the left here: http://fenlandfotos..../p25785286.html. It's actually got a fair bit bushier since then!

It turns out (from shadows on Google Maps) that the cycle path is on its own embankment, rather than the ground sloping up here. Obvious really, but I didn't spot it at first. I assume it was built as part of the work to screen the yard from the surrounding housing when it was re-opened. This embankment is very steep, and following the sequence of Geoff Tibble's photo's here (http://fenlandfotos....855009_121.html) it appears to be some kind of wooden former, with gabion-like bags or boxes of earth/gravel/something wired to the sides to allow plants to grow. Perhaps because it's too steep for an earth bank?

This picture by Alexander Shaw shows the detail quite well, especially in full size: http://rail-image.fo.../p14398225.html

So how to build it? I started off by cutting some mount board to shape for the two sections, and then making a pile of miniature bricks from styrofoam offcuts. These were PVAd to the mount board, and they looked sort of decent but unsurprisingly rather higgledy piggledy. I wanted to capture some of this, since there's variation evident in the original, but perhaps not as much as I did

I went ahead to the second part of my plan anyway, and used a heat gun to round off the bricks and turn them into bags. Not so good... As I probably should have expected, any glue which bled up between bricks didn't melt as quickly as the Styrofoam and left ridges and other naff bits.

I thought about things a bit and decided that a no-glue approach would be better, and would save me having to cut out all those bricks (that I'd already cut out) to boot. I cut new wall sections from 5mm black foam card, and peeled/sliced away the top layer of paper a la Emmanuel Nouaillier. Rather than embossing the sacks, I carved their shapes about 1-2mm deep using a mixture of ruled lines and freehand to try and capture something halfway between order and anarchy. So far so good:

Applying the heat gun again to round off the edges and corners, I was pretty happy so of course pressed on and forgot to take any step-by-step pictures, sorry!

And here's where the sewing comes in: I painted the whole thing with a mix of raw umber and gesso, and then dug out a fine needle and some nylon monofilament for the wiring. A couple of tries on isolated corners suggested that representing all the wiring (two or three wires supporting each sack) would be crazy, and leave the sacks with ragged edges from the needle holes. I ended up compromising and stitching one wire across 2-4 sacks at a time, staggering the stitches so the needle holes weren't aligned. It should be possible to cover them up in earth and greenery later, or just not worry about them (For the sewing-inclined, it ended up as a sort of messy parallel backstitch.)

And here's the result, which I'm quite pleased with - it's not exactly like the prototype, but it's a lot more like it than an earth bank (too steep) or a brick or block wall (not green enough). I'm looking forward to planting it but I should get the rest of the major earthworks out of the way first.

And on the layout - which looks a bit odd, I think it might be slightly misaligned and mangled by perspective, since the courses do line up properly really!

The best thing about all this was that since I was working on the living room floor, my daughter decided to join in and used various offcuts and masking tape to build me some "background mountains" (her words) to put on the layout She's not always convinced that Papa's modelling isn't a waste of time, so it's a treat when she joins in and it passed a rainy day quite well. Next step is to get her soldering up some brass engines for me