Month: December 2020

Now the Christmas holidays are over I have been able to ‘unhide’ Stowey Green from the corner of the dining room..

I have added a bit more hilly/undulating ground on the main Stowey Green board. I think it helps to prevent the flat baseboard look.

First stage was to glue down some good old polystyrene ..

.

Then glue down some J Cloth…

Next I use a mix of poster paints and PVA glue to usually a sort of dark green to use as a base colour for later.
.. This is the finished result – not so easy to see – but will be clearer later.

.. Just goes to show that you can never test the track enough…
I discovered that the track in the inner sidings had created what is known as a ‘dog leg’ on the flexible track just after the point.. Which caused some of my locomotives to gaily throw themselves off the track..

So I decided the best course of action was to pull this section of track up and try again…
…. with a bit of steam.. and reasonable care I managed to get the track off.

Fortunately this section of track only had one power connection and a single point to contend with.

So here is the inner section with the re-laid track.

.. In order to be sure of a proper curve this time I used a 2nd radius half curve of track..

After reconnecting the power and refitting the point (and LOTS of testing) the the track was ballasted (again)..

.

While I was doing the ballasting I also added a bit more ‘scenery’ as can be seen with the glued down J-Cloth over a few pieces of polystyrene.
I have added a few areas of undulating ground to try and stop everything looking flat..

I have been busy working on the hillside scenery and ballasting the track. Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rather messy construction of the ‘hillside’. In keeping with the recycled nature of this layout it was built using the rather messy ‘J cloth’, PVA glue method with bits of polystyrene which was using in the original Burton Crumpnold layout.

Next was the track ballasting.
I found the ballasting process much harder in N the ‘OO’.
The ballast is much finer so even with care it was easy to foul up the points.

Everything has been tested and all seems to be OK, just a bit more cleaning to do to improve the ‘look’ of the track bed.

The next stage is to work out the details of roads and ‘the countryside’.

So here is the layout with all the current buildings. The yellow pencil lines is the proposed ‘road’ using a level crossing towards the top left of the layout.