Plans and plottings

Well quite a lot, and there again nothing has happened since the last post! I took LG to a practical session at the home of our area group secretary, Richard Rundle. We set the boards up, and were pleased to find that they are only a couple of inches higher than our own system (The Slindon Valley Light Railway), so height will be a simple fix. Chris Davies, the 'Lord High Everything Else' of the Southdowns Area Group 7mm NGA designed the modular parameters for Slindon and he agreed that the only challenge was going to be getting from the track exit of LG, just a couple of inches from the back of the board, to the Slindon standard, in the centre of the board. It was decided, over several mugs of hot beverages, supplied by Richards long suffering wife, and general expert on Resturants, Wendy, the we would manufacture 2 adapter boards, hidden from public view, to;
 a) change from side to centre track crossing,
and b). to enable the use of Peco code 75 to code 100 adapter tracks, as LG is code 70 and the Peco flexi 0;16.5 track is code 100.

I favour a 90 deg turn on at least one board, to enable us to set up a longer run, in a shorter space! The other major work will be to include wings and a back scene, to make it, like the other Slindon modules, a self contained section of layout, connected electrically and physically, but not visually.

The final change would have to be the present very Welsh appearance to a more Sussex one! Much of the scenery needs refreshing anyway, so would you after so many years on inactivity! The buildings will be repainted to represent Sussex Sandstone, the slate roofs can remain. Some of the walls can also become sandstone, the others will either need to become flint or hedges, again both fairly simple tasks! I plan on doing some re wiring as I prefer individual control of each point, rather that one click changes points in a set route. The latter makes it hard to tell if all the points changed, so the former is a little more work, but it allows for not seeing a point, but hearing the "thunk" of the H&M solenoid. We also decided to add a couple of inches to the back, to allow the construction of a roadway, to break up the flat appearance of the board.
All in all there is not a huge amount to do, apart from the obvious, to get LG running with our own modules. One last question is, do we keep the name, Lansdowne Green, or do we go for a genuine place in the right area. Since the railway IS fictional, I'm inclined to go with keeping the name as is, and just adding the place on the map, to a location that fits the scenario.
Finnaly, this weekend just gone saw us going to ExpoNG, at Swanley, where I met up with 2 of the original Cottesmore guys, Laurence Murray and Geoff Thorne, and took custody of the board joining template and the scenery template. These allow lining up modules to Cottesmore standards, and will be a great help in building the connector boards.

 Slindon Vale photo's courtesy of Chris Davies
Cottesmore templates courtesy of Laurence Murray Worton Court Blog.