Ballasting and a backscene

 I told myself that I wouldn't put ballast down on this railway as I have always made a mess of the process before ending up with points that were stuck. However, I found myself carrying out the task the other day. I took it nice and slowly making sure that I avoided the switching part of each point. In fact, I actually enjoyed the process, which took about 5 days - so you can see how slowly I took it.

Having got all the ballast down, I repainted the rest of the boards in the Hobbycraft brown.

As you can tell, I have also added a backscene to the boards.  This is one of my foamcore processes. 

As you can see in this image, I cut a piece of foamcore and create tabs sticking downwards. Once, the whole lot is complete, I hold each panel up against the back of the main baseboard and create some slots for the tabs to slide into. This way, I can remove the backscene when I need to turn the main board over to work on the underside.

Now, we come to the downside. I bought a backscene from my LHS - Model Scenery Supplies Backscene 206B - which comes as a roll of 3m long and 380mm high. I cut off some of the height. Now we come to the problem (which you can see on the shot of the whole board above). I can't use the normal method of glueing the paper to the board as PVA has lots of water as a component and this would make the foamcore  warp - I have been there before. Hence, I use strips of double sided tape - four lines along the length. The problem is that it is very sticky so you get one go at it. As you can see, that one go one the first board along the back resulted in some bumps that couldn't be ironed out. I ended up cutting along the bump and re-sticking it down. It looks dreadful. 

This taught me a lesson so, when I did the next board, I glued about 4" down at a time. This seemed to work quite well and, hence, the last two boards were a success. I have ordered a replacement roll from Orwell's, which should be here on Friday. I have changed the order, under Brett's instruction, to their premium brand, which comes as vinyl rather than paper and is pre-glued. We shall see how we get on. Fortunately, because the backscene is in four pieces, I can replace the bad bits easily.

I have also bought some 1" Velcro self adhesive front and back. Once I have got the backscene sorted, I will place a 6" length of Velcro across each joint at the top. I will then cut that at the join leaving 3" on each side. Using the other component of the roll, I will cut out a 6" length of that and use it to fix the  two boards tightly together.

Lastly, I tried the track out with some of my locos. First off, the track needed a lot of cleaning - high grade emery loaded with Track Magic eventually got most of the muck left over from ballasting off the top of the rails. Three issues emerged. 

1. One piece of track had lost its connection to the track bus so I had to make a temporary connection using crocodile clips.
2. My latest loco - a 94XX from Bachmann - was misbehaving. It is fitted with a Next18 decoder from Accurascale - the one that came with my Manor. It jerks three times on starting and stopping which makes it difficult to use. I will take it to Orwells tomorrow to get Kevin to have a look at it. I expect that I will ask him to put a Zimo decoder in as a replacement.
3. The DCC Concepts levers stopped working. I messed about taking the power off and on, etc. but nothing fixed it so finally I took the lid off the lever box and saw that all the pilot lights were out. The battery had run down! It didn't show externally, as there was enough power to keep the LED on the panel working but not enough for the boards.

All three issues will be resolved easily. 1 and 3 are already sorted and 2 will be fixed tomorrow.