Anyone fancy a little Cuddle.. (report that is)

It's been about three weeks since the last layout progress report, so I thought it was about time for some kind of update from my workroom.

Last time I had turned the painting of the embossed stone styrene sheets over to my wife. She offered to do it so who was I to turn the offer of help down?

That left me at a loss of what to do for a while. With time on my hands, I turned to some micro layout design on my old blog Small Model Railway Layouts. One concept was so well received that I will have to build it. You can find preliminary concept work here.

All this has been keeping me busy, but it's not getting any work done on the layout. So I forced myself into action, and I started the ground cover process. The first stage involves covering the baseboard with lightweight sparkle, and for obvious reasons is known as the snowscape stage.

The snowscape phase.

Once that had dried. I set to and painted it with Woodlands Scenics ground colour. This is the same method as I've used on all my previous layouts.

Woodland Scenics ground colour down.

Then, while looking at the location of my model on Google earth I happened upon a photo of the actual beach in front of where the works would have been located.

The beach where the Cuddle works are sited

This helps immensely. Now I know what scenic treatment I have to do for the frontal area. To be honest, it looks an awful lot like Woodland Scenics Grey and Brown Talus.  I reckon I have some in stock somewhere too. Put down a base coat of grey paint and scatter Talus liberally atop of it, and I should be good to go.

In other news, I've found another suitable locomotive to operate the line. It's "Petrolia" of the Blakesley Hall Miniature railway, before its rebuild in 1910. A remarkable looking thing. Only two pictures are known to exist of it though, so some conjecture will be needed to produce a model. But in my early days in Gn15 I used to do that all the time.

I think Petrolia will look great running on the layout (Wikimedia image)

A little report.

It's been a quiet couple of weeks in Cuddle. As I had passed the task of painting the stonework over to my wife, I felt in a little of a void. So my mind began to wander a bit. I gave new life to one of my old blogs, which may, or may not, result in another layout in the future.
Once I got my focus back, I painted and weathered the brick portion of the chimney stack on the main building. Not a task I enjoy, that's why I passed the painting of the stonework over to my wife, who seems to get great pleasure from it. But I think the end result is quite OK.

Painted and weathered brick chimney stack. The cruel eye of the camera makes me realise it isn't finished.

In other news, the Shapeways kits of the tipper skip wagons designed by TeeBee models arrived in the mail, and they look outstanding. No two ways, about it they look excellent. Nicely detailed, and once you put a set of wheels in them, very smooth running indeed. Being 3D printed they are quite light. But it should be easy to add weight to them, given how deep the tipper body is.

TeeBee Shapeways skip. Excellent quality

So, there we are. Not much going on. But we are getting into the summer now, and here in Minnesota it's a time when you can always find something to do outside.
With that, I'm afraid I must close, as the grass needs cutting.