Dauntsey Lock and Monbulk Creek went to their first exhibition in three years, the AMRE show in Adelaide.  They will also appear at the AMRA exhibition in Melbourne this August.  The last couple of months have been spent preparing for these instead of working on Penzance, so I should be able to get back to working on the new one now.

Penzance is continuing to progress in fits and starts.  The paper roads, footpaths, platforms and tracks are now done.  Suitable artwork printed onto self-adhesive label paper is used to make the linear motor track look like something other than a circuit board, and also provides a protective layer for the trains to run (slide) on.  The other man-made surfaces have been done the same way for visual consistency.

Scatter (grass, ballast and sand) will be done later.  The next step will be finishing the buildings.

The layout has finally reached the pieces-coming-together stage, with the plastering, puttying and preliminary painting now done.  Next come the platforms and paving.

All the buildings, railway and non-, have now been built.  The platforms, and the foundations for the ground, roads and dummy tracks are taking shape.  It is finally starting to look like a full model.

All of the non-railway buildings along Chyandour Cliff behind Penzance  station have now been 3D printed.  That works out to about 625m of street frontage, with every building present and to the correct scale.  There are some distortions, with the road and retaining wall curving differently to fit the available track pieces, but close enough.

The first two blocks of buildings along the street behind the station are taking shape.  These are the raw prints, with cleanup, painting and detailing still to be done.  Oh, for a simple row of terrace houses!

After spending the last several months on other projects, it is back to Penzance...

The entire goods yard was picked up and relaid about 15 scale yards further west, for a better but still imperfect match to the tight squeeze of the prototype even if it means more constricted (and hence realistic) operations. The track geometry is the main problem here: the wide track-to-track spacing means that things take up too much space.

The sea wall and retaining walls are now in place, as are the platforms, and I have started work on the paved areas, road packing and footpaths. Rough sizing builds of the non-railway buildings are also under way. As an aid to doing the scenery, I have 3D printed a couple of tiny-scale models of the whole area, based off publicly available LIDAR mapping data. They really help with visualizing things, even if they are anachronistic by 100 years or so.

This round of model-making experiments is finished, so it is back to Penzance.

Continuing the experiments with new scales and prototypes: Stephenson's Rocket on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway c1828 in 1:350 scale.

The 1:220 scale experiments are complete for now, with the G42 Garratt properly articulated and running, as well as versions of the NBH and NBHC carriages.  They all run, so this scale and prototype is definitely an option for a future layout.