Track joints at board edges on the front of the layout are using small brass screws that are cut down to just be wide enough for the rails. Unfortunately I could only work on one board at a time at this point. I would would now want to lay track across the joint and then cut the rails over the joint but here I was cutting and laying the two sides of the joint independently. There is an element of foreshadowing here because if there is anything I would really want to improve on this layout it would be the track running across the joints. The other thing would be to make the baseboards out of different material. These baseboards are 70 x 18mm wood frame with a 6mm MDF surface. If I started again today I would use plywood throughout.

All rail sections and frogs were brought down under the baseboard and wired to choc block screw terminals. All of the wiring points were on the track diagram and there were plenty since it was a DC layout and had isolating sections on all sidings.

Wires were colour coded for inside and outside rails red and blue.

Point motors are SEEP (now Gaugemaster) and are all wired onto screw terminals as well. The idea was that I could replace a point motor with a prewired point motor using a screw driver rather than needing to solder. This all worked fine where there were few points but in the centre of the layout things were going to get very busy.

At this point all of the track circuits and point motor drives were going to be from a control panel so multiway cables were needed to take these connections to the panel.

Multiway  connections were done with SCART connectors. These were very cheap.... I dont think I got too far into wiring the layout before I realised they were too cheap and the contacts were not very reliable. At that point I changed to 25 pin D-Type or D_Sub connectors which have been the most reliable type of connector I have used on model railways.

At this point I started ballasting. I had the idea that brown and cream were good colours for dirty mainline ballast and black and brown were good for yards which probably used to have steam locos stabled in them. We shall return to that choice.