So it’s been a while since I last posted an update on the progress of the main layout, well that’s because progress as ever is very slow.  Work has continued on building the engine shed in the occasional evening (more info part 1 and part 2), but so has the layout.

The last post back in January showed the base boards in place and ready for painting, so since then the board have been painted a neutral grey colour.  I picked this as the model railway I had growing up had a green baseboard, and then trying to make the areas around the track look right became hard work hiding enough of the green.  So my hope with the grey is that this will work for the track work.  In the future I can paint areas where track is not laid a different colour and that won’t matter.

After painting the baseboard and working in the space for a while I realised that I had a problem with the end wall. The mortar between the bricks appears to be almost all sand and likes to drop bits at any time or if you go anywhere near it.  So the nicely painted baseboard was getting covered in sand.

The only option for it was to remove the shelves I’d already put up (well I left the brackets in place) and paint the wall.  The photos below show the different stages of work, but this does appear to have fixed the issue.  It also has two side effects – the first is that I needed to do something about back scene for that stretch, so at least it’s now not raw brick, and secondly it’s helped lighten the overall space.

The next stage is actually to think about starting to lay some track.  The obvious place to start is round by the fiddle yard and out to the main circles of track.  This is because the placing of the points in the main lines is very dependent on where the main lines are, but also the fiddle yard.  In turn where the points are will determine how long trains I’ll be able to keep in the fiddle yard in future.

So I’ve started to lay the first pieces of underlay and just need to drill the holes for point motors and then I’ll be ready to lay the first actual piece of track.  Then will follow the challenge of actually wiring it all together, but I think I’ll leave that for another day….!