Monday 9 January 2017

January 2017 - Layout Manual

Having rashly offered to produce the planned "Manual", I spent the first part of the session taking photographs (almost a hundred!) of the process of assembling the layout. A few of these are included below.

Finishing assembling the legs

First scenery sub-board being added

Connecting up the lighting

Adding one of the smaller scenery sub-boards

Next we attacked the "To Do" list, and managed to knock off a few items. For example, clearance problems within the dairy building were investigated, and it became clear that the Dapol milk tankers, though over-scale, were not the cause of the problems - rather it was the steps on the sides of the shunting locos. So the solution is easy - enforce the ban on locos entering buildings (both warehouse and dairy) which will be written into the Operating section of the manual.







 Richard had brought a draft version of the next stage of the backscene - to fit behind Alan S's warehouse and block the view of the fiddle yard.

 



 The recently added backscene had created operating problems - namely it was too high for most operators to see over...
The fix was "duckboards" resting on the scenery boxes, but these aren't quite high enough for the more vertically-challenged operators, so they will need to be raised by another inch or so.








It was decided to acquire/build three MERG controllers dedicated to the layout, rather than rely on borrowing controllers from individual members, and contributions were collected to finance these.



Substantial chunks of the layout were allocated to members to take away for further work at home - Keith taking the track boards for various tweaking, and Alan S taking the scenery boxes for labelling and rearrangement to better fit the ever-expanding range of buildings.