The gales and hailstones continue so luckily no gardening. There has been plenty of time to progress the platform paving.

My previous layouts were made from chipboard and I used the off cuts to form the platform bases which were then surfaced with 3mm plywood.

The current layout is built with 1/2 inch MDF and again the off cuts have been utilised for the platform bases.

This time I chose to use 5mm balsa wood for the surfacing. This gives me a top of rail to platform surface height of 12mm for my code 100 Peco Streamline track. The balsa surface is held in place with counter sunk steel pins, whilst the platform sides are covered with brick or stone paper.

As a teenager I can remember being very impressed by a railway modeller who had scribed individual paving stones. The whole platform was given a uniform colour wash and then individual paving stones were picked out with different tones.

Life is very short and I do not have time to emulate this level of modelling. However I have proposed to make a start. Having identified some suitable sizes of paving (in a previous entry on this Blog) I decided to mark out some trial 'panels'.

The balsa surface was first scribed using a sharp and relatively hard pencil. The surface was then given a coat of household emulsion paint (Magnolia). This is water based and has a tendancy to swell out any imperfections in the surface. In order to remove the wood grain effect the whole of the platform top was then rubbed over with fine sand paper. The scribed lines were cleaned back out using a pencil. Finally where the pencil lines were obviously cutting across the grain of the balsa wood I lightly scored the lines with a very sharp knife.

So far so good. Maybe 'Magnolia' is too light. I would say better to be too light than too dark. It can always be 'weathered' at a later date. I also need to source some white tape for the edging. Lots more to report on.