Rather good and certainly imaginative, thanks for sharing your ideas

Tim

Looks fantastic, when you do the cottages at the front I would consider moving them forwards a little and including a retaining wall with buttresses for the slope behind. I live in a house with a hill like that behind it, and have a 40ft retaining wall in the back yard, featuring a pulley operated washing line to elevate it to above ground level to dry!

Thanks for that!

I have wondered about retaining walls and may well do as you suggest. The proximity of the cottages to the tunnel mouth and slope seemed implausible until I looked at the tunnels at Penhelig outside Abedyfi. I went on Google satellite view and found it to be as tightly squeezed as my plan.

The same applies to the road passing under the bridge and then rising steeply in a tiny gap - there is an even more congested arrangement of bridges and roads at Tanygrisiau on the Ffestiniog Railway.

Yes, I saw a few bits like that too when I was last in Wales, it is amazing what is crammed into Victorian industrial settlements.

What cad/art software have you used to design that image?

Hi Dave - I used photoshop on one of the pics i had already taken. I copied the image to a new layer, used the Photocopy filter to create a black and white line image. I then selectively erased the bits I didn't want, printed out, sketched the cottages on to the print with a pen, scanned it back in again and placed the image back on top of the photo. I then used my Wacom Bamboo tablet and pen to brush in the colours on a new layer set to Mutlply mode to allow the lines to show through..

I know that sounds like a mouthful, but I'm an experienced photoshop user and it only took twenty minutes to do the whole operation. I used Adobe illustrator to design the track plan.