It's cold in that loft!

The recent weather has rendered work in the loft something short of comfortable! I managed an hour on Friday before I gave up and retreated to the warmth of the house. I was able to spend some time working on the pannier, 7752. I had thought she was running badly because of bent / damaged axles, but upon deeper investigation I discovered that the chassis was bent! This is an old Mainline model that used a split chassis - one half of this was slightly bent near the motor mounts. I don't know how this happened, but after some brute force it looks pretty straight. She still doesn't run as smoothly as I'd like her to - but it was good enough for a couple of trial laps with the breakdown train.

Hannerton New Street Layout

I've cleared the board where Hannerton Station will be. Using the points and track I already have and a couple of paper templates. My initial thoughts was to have 6 through roads and a turntable. See the original plan here. However, six through roads aren't going to work as each subsequent line becomes shorter and shorter, leaving the last 2 loops practically useless!

The turntable won't fit either - having laid the paper template for the turntable out on the board it's much larger than I was expecting. I was planning to use the Peco turntable, but it's simply too big. So a re-think was necessary.

Plan A - 6 loop lines and a turntable.

So after some shuffling around, plan B was born. The number of loop lines are reduced to 4, and the remaining area is sufficient to fit 3 sidings in long enough to take a full train. There's also room for a couple of small sidings for storing locos.

Plan B - 4 loop lines, 3 sidings and 2 short spurs for loco storage.

Hannerton New Street revised plan.

Photoshopped 47

Virgin class 47, 47 805 'Pride of Toton' rounding the curve away from Essington station towards Painton Viaduct. This photograph has had real sky added and has been tidied up in Photoshop.

A little bit more....

Over the last week I've laid some more grass by the caravan site. I've tried something a bit different this time by painting the surface brown before applying the grass - this means any gaps show through as brown, not white!

Some more grass and some fencing along the running line: