There has been quite a lot of action over the last month or two.

Firstly I added the right hand side baseboard for the fiddle yard: another flat top board. Then added the open framed section between the lifting flap and fiddle yard. The final board for now is the low level board between the fiddle yard and the L girder board. I fitted it in front of Newton Purcell. In time i will add the Buckingham West and Brackley Road boards, but I need to lay the fiddle yard, continuous run, and gradient down from Newton Purcell to check it all works and get the levels sorted for the extra boards.

The second of the fiddle yard boards.

The open frame between the fiddle yard the lifting flap.

The board in front of Newton Purcell.

With the boards for the continuos run all in place, I tested the lifting flap again, but found it was binding. I had to angle the closing edges. Once the track bed was screwed on the L girder section and across the flap, I was able to add the MDF bracket to the inner side to relieve the pressure on the vertical post and hinges.

Finally, I have started laying track. I already had the dumbbell stuck down on foam, so I soldered droppers on each end, ready to feed it in under the station. I next laid out the ladder of points where the 10 storage loops will feed onto the dumbbell. Its all about the geometry of course. These are peco small radius electrofrog points. As they are out of sight, I will have surface mounted point motors and micro switches to change the frog polarity. As they will be operated on a route selection basis with a capacitor discharge unit, I needed to limit each route to run over a maximum of 4 points. Anymore and I can't guarantee the cdu will throw them all. Hence the odd layout. Once I was happy with the geometry, I stuck them onto the foam underlay with PVA.

Finally, I spread PVA onto underside of the dumbbell section, fed it back into the tunnel and ran a couple of coaches round to check the clearances. When all was well I pressed it down. I then added the section linking to the points ladder and glued that down. The PVA can still be seen in the photo. Finally I glued the points ladder in place.

When thats all set, I'll glue down underlay for the storage loops which will allow me to work out where the entry points ladder will need to go together with the twin double junctions. In turn that sets end of the gradient.

Rich