Still Progressing

Well, Christmas came and went and some progress was made on Niddbeck Bridge, but not as much as I'd hoped. I'm clearly not as disciplined as Tony for the port and single malt somehow always came first!

Most time was expended painting the various structures constructed from dressed stone plasticard. Getting the stone base colour (Humbrol enamel) on was easy enough but then building up on that to give the effect I was looking for was not easy. I wanted that typical industrial north of England dark, sooty, grimy look that was prevalent before the Clean Air Act and 'smokeless' zones came into effect in the 60's. There are not many examples left to see for real. Most buildings and structures have been sandblasted or have had 40-odd years of acid rain and traffic fumes eating the soot away! You can still find examples in sheltered, hidden corners if you look hard enough. I did get there in the end, though I'm not 100% happy with it. I will have to do a better job on the big layout! A topic for the Group to cover during 2008 perhaps?

The platform, bridge and tunnel are now glued in place and a start has been made on the ballasting. This is typical NER/LNER secondary line ash ballast. I experimented with various proprietry dressings and finally settled on a 50/50 mix of Woodland Scenics fine cinders ballast and Busch fine black quartz sand. In due course it will be toned down and blended in by wafting on some highly thinned weathering 'gunge' via airbrush.

In the coming weeks the landform will be added using 'Kingspan' dense insulation foam offcuts scrounged from the skips on the building site on which I live. This will be finished off using an ultra light decorators filler called 'One Strike', a brand we sell at work. Polyfilla do something very similar at twice the price. Once the landform is in place the backscene can be done and I'm still hoping that the Chief Executive of Scorton Village Stores Plc can lend a hand here!

Another job done over the holiday was to put together a test etch of a class 20 diesel cab that Bob has done for me. It went together and looks well but a moment of careless inattention led to irreparable damage to my Farish diecast body. The project is currently stalled pending acquisition of a spare body (and the return of the wheels from Gordon Solloway).

I am finally getting some camera time on the DSLR purchased 4 months ago and Santa bought me a diddy table top tripod for Christmas. Now waiting for delivery of a new and faster card reader then I will start posting pictures on here again.

My new duties as Association Publicity Officer are also mopping up some time. I have quite an exciting project running which will hopefully receive final committee approval soon. All will be revealed via the Magazine in due course!