Morphaniel

Just finished reading through this thread over a few days and am hugely impressed like many others. I know it was in May that there was a discussion about backscenes but since you paused thereafter to 'learn' the art of weathering locos I hope I am not too late to offer another option. My own small, very slowly progressing layout, Back Yard, is also intended to be set in a grimy location and faced with white painted backboards I was in a similiar predicament to you until I went to the Dumfries show this spring. The host club layout there (apologies - I don't have the programme and I know the host club isn't actually Dumfries MRC...) had a backscene that was essentially a silhouette of a modern cityscape and it looked fabulous. Back home I googled for silhouette cityscapes to find that most are recognisable and therefore unsuitable without much work but I found one that suited me and could be resized to be printed full size for my 6 foot x 6 inch requirements without distorting. A quick printout, sticking to thick card, cutting out and respraying with black primer later I continue to be very pleased indeed. It's an effect that works best with half relief buildings and retaining walls coming off the backscene itself, I think...

More than time for another post! Popping up a few pictures from old RMWeb, here we have a view of the baseboard connectors. These are baseboard alignment dowels from C&L and work extremely well. The layout is not intended to be frequently dismantled, though it clearly is portable. Not shown in this picture is the missing element of the baseboard end 'system', which are the brass devices that the rail is soldered to - I have tried that shot twice and poltergeists keep making it out of focus Next we have a view of the layout with the cork laid. In retrospect I would not again use cork strip in a yard - yards tend to be flat and by using strip I simply made life harder for myself bringing the ground level up to the rail! Cork mat would be my choice, leaving strip for main lines where it is useful for creating the 'cess' effect and for line spacing (this C&L product is designed to aid both). The quality of my cork laying is variable but no-one will see it. Except you Following the C&L instructions (the RMWeb instructions have a thousand variations and arguments...) I used PVA to stick the trackplan to the baseboard, and the cork to the trackplan and then Evostick to stick the track to the cork. A minor flaw here was that the cork covered up the trackplan - luckily I am using Peco streamline, not building my track using Templot... Finally, for those eagled eyed enough and twisty necked enough to have got a good view of the track on the photo above, confirmation that I have varied the sleeper spacing on the Peco streamline - I read the arguments on RMWeb passim and thought 'what the heck'. It was a painful job but I like the improvement. I did my spacing by hand using a rough spacing guide - this is yard track after all! The photo below gives proof of a kind...

This would be the baseboards coming together - I can't remember whether I hit the wine before, during or after, but I know I wasn't using it to weight the top down while it glue The baseboards are 6 feet and 3 feet long. Originally, this was becausethe layout was to be housed in my shed in the back yard (hence the name) but it has since obtained squatters rights in the spare bedroom

So, to the plan: This is the XtrkCad plan of the layout. The two tracks on the right form the 'fiddle area', which will be located behind a large viaduct but otherwise on show. Within the confines of the board dimensions (9' x 18") I have tried to leave myself enough space to model stuff in and around the tracks. The top three tracks on the left run into an engineering shed of some kind (most likely a wagon works).

Back Yard is my addition to the world of planks - a 9 foot layout in an urban setting with an integral fiddle yard (more of a fiddle siding!). It began life on RMWeb3 and is getting built extremely slowly. The sloth explains why it has taken so long to crawl onto RMWeb4, but I have been stung into action (of a sort ) by having it obliquely pointed out that I am one of the guilty posters in the 'feedback' thread who hasn't yet knuckled down and created any content. So clearly I have to fix that over the next few days. Anyone who is eagerly awaiting an actual construction update from the position on the old forum (God bless you sir - you were much younger wehen we last met...!) should of course not hold their breath. My apologies if you have been holding your breath - though more than likely I am too late ! More when I have the pictures available!