Still Here

Still here, still doing a bit, but not as much as I would like. Eight months into our new house and still jobs to do each weekend. Freddie the labradoodle is also now eight months old, getting bigger and needing much more exercise each day...

The station building for 'Niddbeck Bridge' is now ready for painting and then window fitting. The Scalelink chimbley pots look good, even if their online store charged me nearly £5 p&p and sent them in a small jiffy bag with 48p worth of stamps on it...

The plan is to paint all the stonework on the layout in one hit, so have just finished the concave platform and am now working on the horse/cattle dock. These use a lamination of 2 x 5mm foam core board, then spilt down to about 7mm using a wide CK scraper blade. The edges are clad in stone plasticard, stepped out at the top so as the be a close approximation to the published NER standard design. The platform edgings are scribed plasticard at a scale 4'x3', also NER standard. These were precast concrete with a cross-hatched or dimpled anti-slip surface which I did try to press in using a vice with serrated jaws, but could not get an even result. I doubt it would be noticed under a coat of paint any way!

If I can prise the camera away from the wife and No.1 son I might take some pictures to post up this weekend.

Latest DCC purchase is a natty ESU decoder tester with integral motor and speaker. This means I can now test decoders straight out of the box and before any fitting work or lead-wire shortening. I have had a duff decoder as delivered and it's annoying to spend a couple of hours fitting them only to find they don't work.