A Journey Around the Loft

More Greenery

A mammoth hill making session on Friday evening! Having used up all of the plaster-of-paris bandage I've switched to the somewhat cheaper method of an old sheet cut into squares and soaked in watery Pollifilla.

Hedges are strips of thick laminate flooring underlay covered in scatter materials.

It's going to take some time to 'green' all that hill! Notice that the backboards have now been painted sky blue.

Also some more grass and trees by the platform.

The hill runs right along the back of the station area. The hardboard retaining wall has now been covered in brick paper and some piers added.

Crane Finished

The crane that I bought off eBay (click here to see it) is now finished. The previous owner had painted it GWR brown. The crane was dismantled, rubbed down and resprayed into matt black. After reassembly various details have been picked out in different colours.

Wires, Solder and Switches

Well...the control panel is finally (almost) finished! With the last of the point motors fitted and wired up, the last wires were run back to the control panel and routed through to the appropriate locations. The only thing left to do is to fit the last 2 push buttons to control the points (I'm short of these at the moment). The route indicator LEDs are now fully functional and should help my daughters to know which direction the trains will go.

For what is essentially a fairly straightforward track layout, there seems to be hundreds of wires in the control panel! They are all there for a reason...I think!

The other update is that I've finally built a little shelf under the baseboard for supporting the old controller that supplies the 16VAC to the hand held controllers. It is no longer propped up on a couple of plastic boxes!

More Caravans

Started building 3 more of the vans last night - I particularly the the '70s three tone brown colour scheme!

An Uplifting Purchase

Another eBay purchase is this Hornby Crane which arrived today. The previous owner has cobbled this together from at least 2 different sets (the crane was originally yellow, while the match trucks were red) and has repainted it into GWR chocolate. Which all meant it was cheap! The plan is to dismantle it down, tidy it up respray in matt black, pick out specific details in other colours and add appropriate lettering.

I've had a old Pullman brake coach kicking around since we started all of this - the plan is to respray this into black as well to accompany the crane.

Caravan Progress

You may recall that a few weeks ago I shared some photographs of a prototype static caravan which I had built (see it here). Well, now the first 'production' caravan has been completed. The van is drawn on PowerPoint and printed on card. Assembly is fairly straightforward - it took about an hour to do this one.