After a little bit of an enforced break due to work and other commitments, a few hours was found on Friday evening to lay the remainder of the track work on my little shunting puzzle. The steps in putting down the track were fairly conventional:

• The sleeper web was cut
  
• Dropper wire were soldered to the underside of the rails
  
• Holes drilled for the dropper wires to go through
  
• Masking tape laid along the edge of the foam underlay
  
• PVA glue (Unibond in this case) was painted onto the foam underlay
  
• Masking tape removed
  
• Dropper wires fed through the holes
  
• P4 Track company ABS fishplates added to the track
  
• The track put down into position and the sleepers adjusted to be reasonably evenly spaced and square
  
• Ballast sprinkled onto the wet glue surface
  
• Left for 5 minutes before tipping the board to remove the excess ballast
  

Whilst I had the ballast out I also touched in a few areas from the first part of the track laying in which the ballast had not taken well.

The next morning I brushed the ballast to remove any remaining loose ballast and took the board outside to get the shot below - I have removed the background clutter AKA the garden) to make it a bit clearer.

I am reasonably pleased with the result, but there are a few things I would do differently next time.

• The addition of a simple jig for spacing the sleepers and getting them square would help greatly. Using this method you need to work reasonably quickly to keep the glue wet enough for the ballast to take, so the job of checking the sleeper spacing and alignment was a little rushed. Perhaps too rushed, I probably had more time than I thought, but you learn by these mistakes. As a result some of the spacing is a little out and one or two sleepers are not as square as I would have liked.
  
• I made the mistake of painting the glue on all the trackbed before laying any track, I could have done it one at a time to give myself more time and made the whole process less messy. I did manage to get glue on my hands when working on adjacent tracks, not very helpful to the whole process as I ended up with some glue on the rail tops that had to be removed before adding the ballast.
  
• The glue I used was not the best choice, in demos of this method I have always seen Febond used, but I was unable to find a supply so went with Unibond instead. This was not as easy to spread with a brush and did tend to "pull" a little, leaving areas or streaks with little glue coverage and hence little ballast stuck in these areas.
  
• The use of the very dark, almost black, foam was not a good idea. It meant that areas of thin ballast, or were the glue was not exactly to the edge, show through badly and will need touching up. A foam colour closer to the ballast colour would have been better.
  
• The ballast colour itself is a little light, I think an overall airbrush coat to tone it down is definitely in order.
  
• My cutting of the foam was not accurate enough, so my ballast shoulder is not as good as it could be and not as parallel to the track as I wanted. Some of the areas will be filled in, such as the wharf edge to the track and between the front two sidings, so it does not matter that much.
  

None of this is a disaster, it can be tidied up in places and the subject is meant to be a little goods wharf, so I am not looking for mainline track laying standard anyway. This is in part a test piece for different things I wanted to try out, so I can't expect perfection first time around. This method of track laying does give quick results, and with a few changes and a little more care I think I can do a much better job next time. I think for the next project I will certainly use this method again, it saves a lot of tedious ballasting, but does require more preparation first, to cut all the sleeper webs and getting the underlay correct.

I now have a layout with track laid, ballasted, dropper wires in place and uncoupling electromagnets buried in the trackbed, so the next step is some wiring up and getting trains moving. It is then that I will be able to really tell how well the experiment with hand-built points has really worked. Sadly work and other commitments will mean this will probably not happen now until next weekend.