Main North Layout Video

The recent progress on the layout's scenery, as shown in my previous Blog entry, has even shocked me. The major job left in completing the layout, is ballasting the track, but...

When building the layout, I was always in a hurry to get track down and run trains to test the track "plan", with the idea that it will change after running some trains. Yes it has, hundreds of times but now the scenery encompasses the track, there won't be many track changes. Rail Joiners and minimum droppers that until now have provided for so much fun, more so now that the scenery is there, will not provide the fun I need, after I add the ballast with the glue creeping into the solder less joints rendering current flow at best, intermittent. I am surprised that my electrics (really a lack of), have provided for mostly trouble free running, for so long. My attitude was that when there was an electrical problem, I'd attend to it - then. So now there is a BIG electrical problem and I have to attend to it now.

I'll take the rest of my life "bullet proofing" the electrics and then adding the ballast but I can still play trains with my Mates on a sceniced layout with operational Semaphores on most of the single main line, keeping the Operators, apart. It can't get much better, Hey!

I'm now scared I might finish the layout, so I'm gunner slow down a bit, so that doesn't happen. I don't want to rip up the Main North to build another layout. I want to leave that to the Kids to do, they've got to earn their inheritance, hopefully not too soon though.

To celebrate, to what I thought was the biggest obstacle in building the layout, adding the scenery, I thought I'd take a video. I've edited this video to add my newly sceniced Murrurundi (Dec 2017), click below:

PS. I've just remembered the box of Bracket Semaphores, under the layout and building numerous Control Panels etc to make them work, is another "scenery length" job, on the layout. So much more to do.