GETTING DOWN AND DIRTY

When the DAS clay had dried, I tentatively began glueing the plywood sleepers to the hump, starting with the turnout immediately after the summit, using the template provided in the kit. The bottom of the ascent and descent lines were arranged to accommodate the turn-off of each point. When the glue holding the sleepers had set, they were coloured with a suitable wood stain.

By this time, I had joined a couple of Facebook groups dedicated to ‘O’ gauge modern image modelling and, through one of these groups, I have become friends with Paul Owens, the modeller who had exquisitely weathered the Class 13 that I had seen online a month or so before. Paul soon became my go-to advisor and I must thank him for all the help he has provided, both in assisting me in my first steps in track construction and for his tips on weathering.

I found constructing my first point a fairly straightforward process – any initial fears and anxieties were soon allayed and I felt a little euphoric. Other parts of the trackwork soon took shape and I decided to ballast and weather sections of the track as construction proceeded, more for something to do rather than out of necessity. For this, I chose Woodland Scenics medium ballast in light grey. As the track around the hump at Tinsley was completely drenched in oil from locomotives and the Dowty retarders, I also used copious amounts of sharp sand mixed in with the ballast to replicate the build-up of detritus. From the outset, I chose to model the hump during the latter years of operation, shortly before closure in the mid-1980s and at a time when the track looked decidedly filthy.