Well That's All White!

Before

After

Bridge That Gap!

After two weeks of doing nothing to the layout, due to our holiday, we got right back into it again this week. However, instead of continuing with work in the town (as we probably should have done), we diverted our attention to the cutting between Gunnmere Station and Nigglehead Viaduct.

Now, I must confess, we have never been entirely happy with how this looked when compared to the rest of the landscaping around the viaduct and Saggy Bottom Halt area. It just did not follow on from the rest of the scenery, at least that is what Pete, our 'artistic director' felt and I had to agree with him! In fact the top photograph shows how it looked previously so you can judge for yourselves.

Therefore, before we went on holiday, Dave, our 'chief craftsman', constructed a curved wooden base that nicely linked the bottom of the viaduct with the car park at Gunnmere, just visible in the bottom picture.  This car park has also been made bigger as a result of Dave's handiwork so we can now extend the car park a little as well.

Then, at the weekend, we set to and constructed what, we hope, will be a realistic looking embankment that follows on much more neatly from the valley bottom and, also, better matches the embankment on the other side of the railway.

To build it we used lots of screwed up pieces of newspaper with plaster impregnated bandages (a cheaper version of Peco Landform) on top of that. All of this was then covered with polyfilla and allowed to dry during the week before we start landscaping it next weekend.

The long bridge that spans the gap between the two road over bridges (see bottom photograph) was removed while construction took place. This bridge should sit neatly on top of the landform in front of the road bridge in the middle photograph whilst, on the baseboard in front of the landform, we have marked where a road will lead up to the soon-to-be-expanded car park at Gunnmere station.

Obviously I will be following the progress of this work in future postings.