Ive recently been doing a few revisions on the layout.

The first was prompted by a failure.  It had always irked me a little that the above lamp was a little bit crude and the top wasn’t really the distinctive shape the lights at Round Oak had. Being at the back in a dark corner it wasn’t noticeable enough to invest any time into. However when it recently failed why not kill two birds with one stone? So after a bit of tweaking I’m much happier with it now.

Ground Signals.  I originally used the MSE kits but I had found a few drawbacks.  First thing was A few had took some knocks while cleaning the track.  As they use a whitemetal casting for the main body and legs they really didn’t like this at all and were starting to look a bit bent and battered.  Secondly as I had fitted lights there wasn’t a lot of room to work and I had just drilled out the lamp housing and shoved a nano LED in there with slightly mixed results.

One consequence of this wass more light bled out of the bottom than through the signal despite various attempts to fill the hole

So step in the Palatine models etched kits as a replacement. These are hopefully stronger and being an etch theres more room to position the LED in a better controlled way.  I say more room but in 4mm scale ground signals are tiny but because of that even a slight gain is a big help. I modified the kits a little to make them work and drilled a couple of holes for the lights. Results are below

On the subject of signals Ive been playing around with resistors again to try to get the lamps a bit closer to how the real thing looked and less like a modern colour light. I think I’m there now.

Up on the road Ive added a few telegraph poles meaning I think I can call this area finished now. A revisit to my classic (or is that cliché?) scene.  This time a wider verson.