Layout progress (1)

After Fridays "blocking out" it didn't take long for some tangible progress to appear. I started to slice away at the white foam with my new hot wire cutter and the landscape began to appear. The picture below shows the "typical Minnesota winter" stage of layout building; i.e. everything is white. You can see how I have quite literally been hacking away with a knife and hot wire cutter to give the ground some shape. The roughness is of no consequence as the next stage will be to cover it in lightweight spackle once I have added a little extra to the river bank, finished the bridge abutments and bedded them in.

What you will also notice is that there is a big old gap between the end of the bridge and the beginning of the curve. Sixty-seven millimeters of gap to be exact. The shortest length of MicroTrains roadbed track is 110mm (what kind of knuckle-head thinks that 110mm is a good shortest length of track). So I need to shorten a couple of sections of track by 43mm to fit them in. Not a difficult task as there is a step-by-step guide here on David K. Smith's James River Branch website. I knew I'd seen this in my previous trawlings through the site and it only took a few minutes to find it again. The process looks pretty easy to do. I've got a pack of 12 straights so I should be able to get two short sections out of those.
Finally a view of what the layout is about. The train running over the bridge. In this specially posed shot you'll see a new item of rolling stock. A weathered Railbox from MicroTrains.

I like Railboxes as readers of my other blogs will know. This one is a gem and looks like a pretty good representation to me. Perhaps I'll write more on it another day. But right now dinner is almost ready, so I'll bid you all adieu, 'til next time.