Barry Ten

I'd also never given much though to ballasting through a goods shed - although in my defense I've never really had a goods shed where you could ever get the right angle to look through it. All looking good anyway, Cap'n - and those terraces are the absolute mutt's nuts.

Looks very nice, Dave. Got a thing for brown vehicles as well...

I've got a couple which both run well, but both had irritating smudges of whiteish residue on the bodywork, as if from cyano adhesive. Generally, though, I've not had a problem with the running qualities of any Hornby locos in recent years.

Well, other than the Lord Nelsons and the King Arthurs ... both of which have been done to a good standard, what is there left in terms of big southern 4-6-0 passenger motive power? As a soft Southerner myself I feel quite well served by the RTR manufacturers of late, in fact there's an embarrassment of riches. We could use some smaller mixed traffic types but the C class is coming so that's a very definite step in the right direction, and there are always kits if there's a loco you really, really must have.

I buy the little square tubs they sell in Wilkos - comes in handy for lots of other modelling jobs too.

Neil - I dilute it with water, about 50 50 or 70 water and 30 copydex. I haven't noticed any smell once it's set, but then again my layout room is directly over a fishmonger's.

I kicked off the ballasting on the summer module with this short stretch over the culvert, which will be difficult to access once the road bridge is in place. As mentioned elsewhere, I now use Copydex rather than PVA, which retains a degree of resilience once it has dried, so that the ballasted roadbed still has some give in it. Other than that the process is the same; sprinkle down the ballast, mist over with water, then add the dilute Copydex solution through a pipette or eye-dropper. The result is ballasted track which still has almost as much sound-deadening properties as foam underlay. I'm using Woodland Scenics underlay and ballast, by the way. The underlay is a denser product than the Peco one and by all accounts is durable enough to last the lifetime of a layout. I paint track and sleepers with sleeper grime to begin with, apply the ballast, then go back over the sleepers and rails with another coat of grime, which serves to conceal any stray bits of ballast stuck to sleepers and rail sides. I also add a few dabs of rustier shades here and there. Once I've done a decent stretch of track, I also tint the ballast slightly with various dirt and oil coloured washes to suggest track which has had some usage. Call me mad but I quite enjoy ballasting. Surely no other activity makes so much difference to the realism of our models in one hit? I'm struck, as always, by how the addition of ballast not only improves the track, but it makes chassis detail stand out so much more on the trains themselves - the parts no longer lost in shadow, but visible against the sleepers and ballast. And that's 50% of the visible pointwork on the entire layout now ballasted!

Echo the above - had to get the cab moulding out of mine to fix a loose window, and it came free with only mild persuasion. I then had to do it a second time after the same window came loose - doh.

I don't know if there's something particularly bad about the Schools but I managed to break two of them in one evening. That kind of micro-surgical soldering is well out of my skills envelope so both had to go back to my local service center for fixing. The wires are definitely too flimsy and not strongly soldered to the plug or the PCB or the loco.

Not being able to find the critical thing when I need it. eg right now I have a painted Iron Mink Gunpowder van sitting on my desk waiting to be lettered, but I've mislaid the very book which inspired me to do the conversion in the first place, and which has the all-important photos in. So the Mink sits on my desk, gathering dust, at risk of bits being knocked off, while I wait for the book to turn up. The book will turn up when I'm looking for something else, of course... This is a very minor annoyance in the scheme of things, of course, more of a "doh - why does this always happen!". If too much about the hobby was annoying, I'd find another hobby.

Hi Dave - thanks! No, haven't experimented with colour temperature yet but I would love to get a bluer, colder feel in on the winter module if at all possible. I'd also like to be able to switch off the tubes and provide a secondary blue-ish illumination for night scenes, but that's for the future. I could probably just bung a blue bulb in the main room light. By the way, the visible tube on the winter module will eventually be hidden but for now it's a useful source of light when working on general modelling projects.

It was good to have a close look behind the scenes at Chris Nevard's marvellous Brewhouse Quay during Railex, one of the benefits being that I saw the use of bendy MDF for the first time. I'd not knowingly seen this stuff in the flesh, but now that I had an idea what to look for, I quickly found a big pile of sheets in my local B&Q. They must have been staring me in the face every time I'd been in before, of course. All the scenic modules on the S&D layout employ curved backscenes, with a height of 14" from water-level to the top of the sky. The first one I made, the spring module, uses a containing box of thin MDF, with card sky sheets glued into this box bent into self-supporting curves at the corners. This is fine as far as it goes but it is hard to disguise the joints between the sheets and there's only so much re-working you can do to such a backscene once it's in place, due to its delicate nature. The winter module was of a similar design, but I later became dissatisfied with the original painted backscene. Knowing that it would not withstand repainting, I layered a sheet of thin, bendy perspex over it and painted a completely new backscene on top of the old one. The perspex backscene is relatively easy to work with and could be repainted as many times as I like. Both the spring and winter modules needed to be kept relatively light in view of the bracketing used to support them. For the summer module, however, I'd used much heavier duty bracketing (because the boards were deeper, and I never expected to extend the American layout around that part of the room) and so while this heavy bracketing has proven a pain in some regards, it does allow the use of much heavier backscene material. To that end I installed three sheets of bendy MDF, totally nearly 13' in total, with a frontage of 8'. I glued and clamped each sheet before proceeding with the next, taking several days to put all three in place. I then used crack-resistent filler to smooth over the joins, allowing it to dry hard (overnight) before sanding gently down. When all looked good, I applied three layers of white primer. I was ready to start actual backscene tonight but was disappointed to see that hairline cracks had opened up between the sheets, so it was back with the filler. I'll sand it down and re-apply primer, and see how it looks. Anyway, here's progress to date - lots of nice empty baseboard as we look down the length of the summer module: Entry of the tracks through the left hand backscene. The lean in the backscene will be corrected once I fix the fascia in place (er, the thing the light goes on - is that a pelmet?). I've left an area under the tracks here which was originally going to be a low-height road bridge but will probably end up being a culvert and stream. In other news, I spent a few evenings adding SEF flushglazing to these two Bachmann Bulleid coaches. I think the result is an improvement but as always it's a personal thing; while it's true that the vac-formed units will never look as good as precisely fitted window inserts, they are cheap, relatively easy to work with and for my money a definite step-up from thick-walled plastic coach sides. Plus, you get lots of spare bits in the SEF packs. I tend to work on a batch of coaches, put them aside, and then come back and selectively replace the less well done bits. I still have another Bulleid to do in this rake, and an elderly Mainline MK1 in southern green. Working on these, incidentally, I have been impressed at how easy it is to dismantle the Bulleids. The simple design suggests that they could be good candidates not only for close-coupling mechanisms but also for putting in some coach lighting at some point. I could face doing a short rake of these. Going back to the spring module, here are a few shots of the attempt to integrate foreground trees and painted backscene, to swallow the shadows from the 3-D trees: Finally - just before the funny bit at the end of the news with some pandas - a couple of wide-angle shots of the spring and winter modules. Cheers and thanks for reading.

Noticed last night that this simplified track layout is virtually identical to that of Barry Norman's Petherick, even down to the two back to back points in the yard, rather than a double slip. Good enough for Barry N, good enough for Barry Ten, I say.

Hmm - my last attempt to reply vanished, but yes, thanks chaps, for the useful suggestions. I like that signalbox, Neil - just Googled it. CK - yes, it's no problem to extend the scenery, at least at the level of the trackbed or higher.

Buckjumper - it's a good idea about drawing the eye, I'll have a better idea of the available real estate shortly. Should be room for a small hut. And yes, those are two back to back turnouts although a slip would have been a better space-saver in hindsight. Dave: I think Sturminster Newton was the only staggered platform station on the S&D but there may have been another one. If you're familiar with the prototype, you'll know of the unusual dropped section of platform which allowed passengers to walk across to the end of the other platform.

Charming, and of course sets the period very well indeed.

With the glorious weather we've been having, it seems only fitting that progress on my S&D layout finally reaches the "summer" module. And now that I'm finally forced to make certain critical decisions, it's become clear that I'm no longer even pretending that this is Shillingstone, or even an attempt at "essence" thereof. I'd already made major compromises with the track layout, but the clincher has been the need to disguise the entry and exit points of the track through the backscene. I've used view blocks on the other modules, but only for single track. Here we've got three tracks entering the scene on the left, which means a big cut-out in the backscene, which you're almost looking straight into when viewing things from the extreme right. An overbridge, though a bit of a modelling cliche, seemed the best solution. There is no similar structure near Shillingstone, though. On the other side of the module, some experimentation showed that I could still get away with a view-block, which meant a level crossing was a possibility ... and I like level crossings, so we'll have one there. But by the time I'd worked this out, I'd become concerned about the cramped nature of the goods yard, situated on the same side of the tracks as the main station building, signal box etc. The solution, obviously enough, was to flip the station onto the other side of the tracks, and thereby free up most of the frontage of the layout for some longer, less cluttered sidings. Pros and cons, as ever - I like the roadside approach to stations, but the rear elevation of Shillingstone isn't (in my view) particularly characterful. And, of course, I do like the idea of using Bachmann's forthcoming range of models - with whatever tweaking is necessary or feasible to bring out the best of them. Now we get the front view of the station and signal box. An idea I was tinkering with for about as long as I've been building this layout is some kind of dairy or factory serviced by a siding or two. But as always less is more, and I've now binned that one, tempting as it was. So what we've got is a model which now preserves the correct orientation of track curvature with respect to Shillingstone, but which has the goods facilities much simplified and on the "wrong" side of the tracks. With that in mind, the module has become a representation of a fictitious Dorset station which mingles a bit of this and a bit of that, hopefully to pleasing and uncluttered effect. Importantly, the track, which has been down and running for three years, remains untouched - if it ain't broke, etc. A large area is still "TBD" - it could include a pond, a representation of a bend in the River Stour, or a small village scene. In the meantime I've begun putting in the very long continuous backscene - pics to follow in a day or two, I hope. Cheers and thanks for reading.

It's a Roco model, Martin, scale length as opposed to the slightly compressed Fleischmann one.

An impulse purchase, a souvenir of 20-odd years of living in or visiting the Netherlands, a reminder of the daily commute I did for two years on these highly reliable units, or a hint of a future modelling project? Not sure yet, but ideas are germinating... NS Plan V electric multiple unit, newly released DCC sound equipped model by Roco. Just needs a few dead flies on the front and it will look the part...