Model Railway Forum

Incredible layout - jaw dropping stuff. The engineering is just superb and very impressive!

Bit small, think you should extend it. I am envious of the space.

RSR Engineer wrote: ↑Tue Feb 05, 2019 12:17 am Work on the control panels has progressed a bit further. The theoretical design has proved to be practical but my handicraft skills are not really up to the job, I must confess. I toyed with the idea of having the so called "islands" lasercut professionally with NC technology but the price would have been horrendous.

Cheers,
Artur

Amazing! My handicraft skills aren't up to 1% of that job, nor is my pocket deep enough nor do I possess a room big enough.

Enjoy your skills, such as they are and keep the photos coming so we can spend more time green with envy!

Many thanks for your kind feedback, gentlemen. Please don't flatter me too loudly, otherwise my head may start to exceed the loading gauge. Producing those perspex "kits" was a total pain in the proverbial, and the bigest one's still to be done. Oh, well, grin and bear it and get your finger out, Art!

Actually, Wtd, there was at one time a scheme for an extension into the garden via a tunnel through the west wall and a viaduct/enbankment along the back fence, but it was soon dropped for a number of reasons, mainly a lack of knowledge and experience of outdoor modelling and the perceived difficulty of closing said tunnel against the weather and long-leggedy beasties.

Cheers,
Artur

There’s always next year

Mmm.

Are the locals annoyed about loosing their Village Hall.

No problem closing the opening in wall from weather and cold conditions. Just build a water proof flap similar to a cat flap. You can improve on the standard cat flap design by extending it out wards for few inches. You could also build small sliding cover to seal the inside wall and piece of foam in wall to keep out drafts out in winter.

Put like that, footplate, it doesn't sound such a hard job after all. I'd just need to set a conduit throught the double walls. Unfortunately, the garden has undergone various developments in the meantime and there are now numerous obstacles (shed, deck, shrubs etc). It seemed like a good idea at the time; now it's just "would've-been-nice-to-have".

A few words of explanation on the "village hall" may be in order here. When I bought my house in 2005, the seller offered me the rundown cottage next door for just the price of the ground. As it was within my budget, I snapped it up. The main reason at the time was to avoid having neighbours so close that we could hear each other stir our tea. After a few years of using the cottage as a halfway house for rubbish on its way to the tip, I suddenly had the idea of making one big room in a large part of the ground floor by taking out the interior walls. The realisation that the resulting space would be 8.6 x 5.8 metres made it irresistible. Work started in 2010 and progressed in fits and starts as time and funds became available. The creation of the "village hall" is also documented (but not from the very beginning, as it didn't occur to me at first to take pictures) on flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/145238858 ... 8658050710

Cheers,
Artur

Lot's of work in that too - when is your 'planned' finish date for the whole project, 2020?