From Gunnmere to Gone mere!

 

 

This weekend saw us lifting the track from just north of Gunnmere as well as on the section across the middle of the Shed that, effectively, divided the room in to two.

The idea was to allow us to remove the crawl-through, which we had to negotiate every time we wanted to move from one half of the layout to the other. 

Well, as you can see, by the end of the day we had achieved our objective and the crawl-though had gone. 

I must confess that it was fantastic to be able to move between the northern and southern halves of the layout without having to get down on our hands and knees. However, on occasion, we would still find ourselves automatically starting to dive under the now non-existent barrier!

Of course this does mean that we no longer have a large continuous loop around which we can run our trains but there will be a smaller loop incorporated into the new-look layout.

Other plans include newly located stations for Davemoor and Carswater plus another, smaller, intermediate station called Manxton. 

As I have mentioned before, the branch line is going to be extended from the current terminus at Lake End to a new terminus at Anchwood. This section of line will cross the new formation of the main line a couple of times and the plan is for this to be a steam-operated, preserved railway.

Finally, as can be seen in the bottom photo, immediately beyond Gunnmere, the double track main line will become four tracks with fast and slow lines in each direction. 

These four lines will extend to where Carswater is at the moment before reverting to two tracks again and will allow us some interesting workings with expresses being able to pass both goods trains and local stopping trains.

All of this is, of course, for the future and our first step is to begin by relaying the track beyond Gunnmere - not an easy task, I must confess, due to the point-work that is now necessary.