We are a week into 2012, the festive season is well and truly over, and New Year resolutions already broken. It is time to look seriously at some objectives for 2012.

On the Rede Valley, my 2011 aim was to have an operational layout that could run trains. The main obstacle to this had been completion of the Viaduct, so that the continuous main line circuit could be completed. This was achieved, and by and large the layout is operational. There is still quite a lot of track to lay in order to complete the total plan: The main freight yard and the locomotive depot haven’t been started; there is an extra set of platform roads to lay through the main station, and the branch line out of Otterburn Junction into the military camp hasn’t even been planned.

With all this work to do, its difficult to know what to do next. All the work so far has been about building baseboards, laying track and connecting up the electrics. I’d rather like to have some variety, so the 2012 objective has to be about completing part of the layout scenically.

The intention is that the Rede Valley is a series of dioramas, with the flexibility that the time period in which each is set, and indeed the time of year each represents, is not always the same. For instance I intend to model Otterburn Junction in LNER 1930′s while the main station Monkchester will be set in the 50′s or 60′s. The easiest of these dioramas to complete should be the Viaduct section, as that will be modelled as an open moorland landscape, loosely based around the Waverley line through the Scottish Borders. So my 2012 objective for the layout is to complete the viaduct diorama to a standard that would be good enough for publication in the UK model press.

Read more on the external blog

There are also updates on the Chathill page to include extra photos and the trackplan of the prototype, and I've made the ECML and Waverley working timetables downloadable after complaints that they were unreadable on some windows systems.