Man with huge fingers builds tiny railroad...

Finished weathering and gluing the portals in place tonight.

Some goodies arrived today:

Faller engine shed assembled, weathered and built a pad for it. Needs a little more detail work but that will come later.

I've been loving watching this and hoping for the next update.  But can I crash this thread for a min? 

I thought about starting my own 'Man with fat fingers doesn't actually build anything' thread, but it would be very short so since this is about N guage I may as well drop in here.

I've got the remains of my old stuff here in the USA.  It was all bought circa 78-81 at a guess.  I used to have a probably 2x8 piece of particle board I'd make layouts on.  I never detailed them as I'd pull them up and try something new every few weeks.  Spent a few happy years from 9 until early teens playing with it all.  Somewhere along the line most of the track and few bit's of rolling stock got lost.  What I have left was in storage at my parents when I moved from the UK to the US in 1994 but got brought over.  This thread made me dig it out.  What I've got left is as follows.

All my rolling stock was Graham Farish, a British model railroad company that was founded in the 1940's and according to Wiki is now part of Bachmann which is now Chinese owned.  I'm glad they still exist though.

My pride and joy was my 'Golden Arrow' which was a special version of their regular 4-6-2 Merchant Navy class engine.  The Golden arrow was a real train, it was a first class train from London to Dover that pulled ten or more Pullman carriages.  They then went on a ferry over to France and continued to Paris.  The Golden Arrow model cost a few pounds more than the regular Merchant Navy loco.  I have Eight Pullmans, four each English (brown and cream) and French (Blue).  With three standard and one brake coach of each.

I appear to have lost my little 0-6-0 tanker.  It looked something like this.

I still have most(?) of my rolling stock here

And my old points

And that's all I have.  All this is 40 year old technology so no fancy control.  All I had was a single variable speed controller and manual points.  Every time you wanted to do something you had to reach over and change the points manually so you could put one engine in a siding, change points, change points on another siding and power up the other engine.  I take it from some of the strange abbreviations and acronyms I"ve seen things are far more advanced now, but I don't know about compatibility?

It's been sitting in boxes bouncing around continents for over 35 years so I doubt I'll do much now, but it was fun to pull it all out and snap some pics to post here.

That's all folk.  Hopefully back to your irregularly scheduled man with huge fingers actually building something.

Thanks for sharing, that's really cool stuff. I never appreciated the English trains when I was a kid but now that I'm older, they're beautiful pieces.

I haven't been up to much lately as this is the time of year that eats all of my disposable income. My vehicle insurance, property insurance, taxes and a bunch of other stuff all come due from January to April. Should be in the clear in a couple months and I plan to make some more progress.

Long time since an update. Life gets in the way and I can't get to my shipping address in Washington because of the bat flu so it's harder to get supplies.

I ordered some building flats from a seller on eBay. Glued them to a foam board backer and started cutting them out tonight. These will work as the city backdrop and give some more visual depth to the layout. Not the final position, just playing around at the moment.

Man, those look really good!  One of my future projects is a 2d model of either the Kellogg or Post factory for the back of our "Battle Creek, MI" portion of the layout. 

Long overdue update. Summer got in the way and I would rather do outside stuff.

Ordered some molds from scalecast in the UK. I have a gallon of clear epoxy resin left over from another project so I might as well make my own stuff.

Some rock wall molds:

Here is what they make:

Here they are with a rough first coat of paint:

These will be used to build the retaining wall for the second level of the layout.