Walling off my summer.

 I have had a fairly productive summer break from work. My time has been divided by various jobs on the layout and catchup repairs from the lockdown period. Ultimately, I had set myself some targets for the summer period to improve the running of the layout and to sort out the ongoing issues with the rolling stock. I have managed to finish the vast majority of these jobs and have finished a few other extra things that were not in the original plan. The biggest of which is the new retaining wall at the west end of the line. 

I have been trying to give the layout a more unified look and feel that reflects the location that I am trying to model. I found some inspiration from the creation of a group on Facebook concerned with modelling the Corris Railway. I took ideas from this group and set about building a retaining wall along the northern slope to disguise the poor effort on the slope.

The first layer of styrene is laid.


I used styrene to make thin slabs and built them up with wider slabs the higher up the banking I went.




I eventually ran out of styrene and moved on to using mounting board card to finish the wall. 


The wall was sprayed with primer and then given a wash of darker grey paint to age the wall and make it look more like Welsh slate. 



The wall has been left to dry and will be weathered some more to make it look older. I need to add scatter around the grassy areas to disguise where I was a little over-enthusiastic with the primer. 







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