Thursday 5th November

Worklist:
A mixture of tasks today, but mainly scenery and track cosmetics.

Laurence filled in loads of holes all over the layout - old fence posts, redundant track-side equipment, pointwork and wires etc. He and Stephen then shared the over-painting of the old grassed areas with brown acrylic paint. Laurence then switched to painting sleepers, with a paler colour than before - a light grey/brown instead of dark brown, which Geoff says is very un-prototypical.

Geoff worked on trackwork ballast, infilling delicate areas such as around point actuators, then moved on to patching sparse and missing areas of ballast.

Stephen laid out buildings and features around the main yard. The coaling stage was moved to the head shunt, as discussed previously, which was approved by all. There is a separate track electrical section in front of the coal stage, which is perfect. The coal will be delivered via the yard access road, which will require a little amendment to accommodate lorry access. An old crane from Langley Works (Geoff's section of Cottesmore) was tried-out in the yard. The crane legs worked well with the rock mound whilst maintaining access to the store and the access road. Approved by all. (NB it's steam powered at present, so updating to electric power might be in order).

The water tower will remain in the station. Our reasoning is that loco's need regular supplies of water, but coal is taken-on far less frequently.

One of the running sessions had identified an area of road crossing timbers that were too high and fouled the coupling. Geoff first tried a chisel, but changed to a Dremel sanding tube, for much better results.

All areas of the original grass was also given a coat of dark brown acrylic (following Gordon Gravetts advice), prior to base flocking and then electrostatic longer grass. A final added feature was the shed and decking that used to be at the very end of the layout (where the bridge was moved to), has been placed in the gap left by the bridge - effectively swapping places! It's in keeping with our efforts to retain what we can of John's original layout.

Brown paint everywhere

As a finale, we discussed the power supplies for both the layout and future features.

Layout: the new DC supply installed last time for the electromagnet would now be used for the point relays and servos as well. The AC supply would be used solely for the ECM loco controller.

Features:
Mine board - lights down the tunnel and the workshop.
Middle board - Generator building lights and engine motor. Goods shed lights.
Yard - store lights.

As there are no spare wires in the middle board loom, it was decided to provide another power feed to one of the end boards, through the loom. The other boards would be fed though a 'power bus', with some form of jumper, at each board joint. Transformer units would be supplied to each feature, adjusted to provide the appropriate voltage. Switches would be located on each board, for each feature.