An aside

I've just recently taken time out from construction of my 'Railway Pier' module to build an NAB carriage to 1/4" scale as a gift for my Dad on his birthday (what a son!). 

The underframe has been scratchbuilt from brass sheet and section, bogies are from Ian Lindsay, and the body and roof were scratchbuilt from laminated styrene (I do hope Frank Kelly was wrong when he said it the styrene might warp in time!).

The eagle eyed might also notice that, in the absence of a 1/4" diorama, the model is featured on the deck of the under-construction Railway Pier.

Working to 1/4" scale was very rewarding (and certainly much less fiddly than 3.5mm!), and I plan to do more modelling in this scale in the future.  A possible future 1/4" VR broad gauge microlayout?

A holiday at the beach?

Well, just logged in and realised how long it's been since I last posted.

Between then and now much has progressed.  Work in the attic continues (it always does when you're doing it yourself!), but 1/3 of the flooring is in place. 

Given that converting the attic is a big job work has begun on a module which can both be used stand-alone (with a fiddle-yard) and form part of the larger layout once built.  The theme of the module is Railway Pier circa 1900-1910.  Since I didn't have 7.51 metres to spare the pier will be truncated to a 1.8 metre length with the intention of an 'atmospheric' re-creation showing the hussle and bussle of busy Port Melbourne during that time period.

More pictures will follow once the diorama starts to come together.