Ballast, Bothy and a Baby Bachmann

Time for another update on our progress so far and from the top picture, you can see that the Ballast Yard is still being worked upon. I think we have now given it its final coating of stone and rock dust and, from the photo, you can see that the glue is still fairly wet! Next time we will be concentrating on the edges and, maybe, installing some yard lights.

Meanwhile, behind the ballast yard, and with the help of my nephew and his girlfriend, we have 'built' a stone shelter, or bothy, complete with camp fire and outside seat for sitting and admiring the countryside. A couple of hill walkers are also crossing one of the footbridges while, in the distance, a farmer and his dog are coming up the hill in order to gather his sheep.

The third photo gives another general view of this section of the layout wherein we are also slowly adding more trees to make the hills look a little less barren.

Finally, we have added sound to our Bachmann Class 03, not an easy job given the restricted nature of these smaller locos. The sound is by SWD and is very good, I must admit. We used a YouChoos SugarCube7 speaker and the sound is quite impressive from such a small speaker. However, either through dirty track or faulty pick-ups the loco's performance was decidedly dodgy when we were running her in. So, unfortunately, it is back to the workshops for a quick check to see what the problem might be!