It has been a fair while since I blogged but there has been a fair bit of activity. My postlady must be getting sick of having to bring packages for me. Here are some of my more recent purchases:

The Mikadotrain X73500 - A truly spectacular model! I have written a rather rudimentry review of it here .

The Busch campsite which will be position adjacent to the lake I am going to construct on one of the new baseboards.

A fantastic french building that uses a rather unique method of construction whereby you have to glue the 4 sides together and then seal the bottom of the model to a surface that wont leak and pour plaster into the model to make it solid. It looks very interesting to build and I am looking forward to it!

Noch road surfaces (some others from Busch are also on order) these are going to be used in the main town to give it a better look with the new layout of it (see further down the page).

The last is something I have been trying to get for some time. The SNCF cinema carriage. It is a rather odd carriage but I love the colours and the logos.

Some of the above products represent a bit of a step away from the methods I had been using. I am now keen to try and get the layout looking a bit more polished around the edges and as well as all of the above I have purchased a grass mat which will help to make some of the fields look better than my dark scatter attempt.

In terms of work on the layout I have been making some progress. The main thing to note is that the walls in the town have been painted once for their base colour, painted again (and then rubbed off) to give the mortar colour and then weathered.

Its looking alright. This section of the town is far from complete though but it does look a lot more prototypical than it did.

I have also taken the plunge and lifted all of the trackwork in the main station as part of a project to remodel the layout of the station to make it more robust. As part of this work I needed to remove the hill behind the engine shed:

Before

During

After

After this was done I now have the job of scraping up all the plaster, cardboard and scatter material that was laid in the station area:

Before I cracked on with that I had a go at test positioning the track and I was quite pleased with the positions (it was very rough but gave me some ideas about clearances):

So that is what I have been doing. I have also been working on some rolling stock, most notably X3900. However this is not really photoworthy at the moment.

If you have got this far without me boring you to sleep then thank you very much for reading.

As a quick note, I know my layout is probably not the best or of interest to everyone so I am always pleased to see that a few dedicated readers always seem to make the effort to have a glance over it. I always try and make these blogs interesting with pictures and some actual progress but if anyone has any comments about things they would like to see more of/less of then please let me know.

Cheers

Stephen