During the past few weeks I have mainly been catching up on a backlog of other projects mainly loco work in various scales before starting work on the layout as such.

Keeping to a Midland or GSWR secondary line theme a dozen yards of Code 70 fb rail, wooden sleepers and spikes arrived, followed by a session of pretend cresoting using Carr's sleeper stain before reaslising an acrylic wood stain would be more effective and economic.

The sleepers are 1.8mm stripwood rather than ply which should give an interesting full depth sleeper effect, I am planning to follow American practice and spike down the fb rails rather than solder and printed circuit board, bullhead will be on Carrs chairs of course.

I also framed the baseboard on the opposite side of the workshop which gives me a u shaped area approximately 17'X11' for the railway.

The shed is a converted garage with a roller shutter door at one end which I hope to replace with a wall and doorway when fund allow hopefully at some stage next year.

I have actually managed to do some work on the layout building a traverser for a fiddle yard at one end using plywood and drawer sliders from the local DIY shop.

I am starting to re-use track from a 21mm gauge layout I started a couple of years ago for the traverser and hidden trackage with the fancy stuff on the visible sections.

I am looking at two single lines one in bullhead the other in fb running from the traverser into a station to give the impression of a junction between two separate companies as an excuse to mix GNR and CIE locos and stock.