Grand Tour

With Martin traversing the country for work, I took a few days off to join him on his Grand Tour.

First stop Newcastle . . . monumental historic buildings, stunning modern architecture and the bridges over the Tyne:

Add to that the opportunity to catch up with an old friend, a vampire rabbit (really!), and the Angel of the North, and Newcastle is a city to go back to.

Off the clock, we moved on from Newcastle en route to family in East Anglia.

Stopped off at Whitby - where we found a great cafe (Sherlocks) for lunch - walked up to the Abbey - and generally took in the sights.

Couple of days then catching up with family - including a trip out to Kings Lynn (which has some great old buildings reflecting its past as a major medieval port):

All in all a nice few days away . . .

It's a Monster . . .

Well now it's underway our local Tesco / M&S development is growing like Topsy:

Or as put in an overheard passing comment . . .  'It's a Monster!'

SNOW!

Can't say it lasted for long - first (and probably only) snow we'll see this year . . .

When Good Showers Go Bad . . .

Slight problem with the downstairs shower this weekend.  Noticed water leaking from the casing yesterday, got in touch with our builders but unfortunately their plumber was out of town so there wasn't anything they could do that day.

By this morning it was running, rather than dripping with water - Martin turned the water off at the stopcock and tried to get the leaking valve off, but not luck.

Somehow, in fiddling with it, he must have tightened something though, because when we switched the water back on (at a lower pressure admittedly) he seemed to have stopped the leak.


Waiting for the plumber to come and take a proper look - so using the upstairs shower in the meantime.

Update - 19 March - plumber finally showed up, and fingers crossed it's all fixed!

Planning the Track

Spent some time today trying to finalise the track layout on the baseboard - in theory we came up with something like this:

Experimented with other layouts, but this still seemed to work best in terms of making use of the space - and the smooth running of the trains.

Will probably mull it over for a bit before fixing everything down mind you!

Onwards and Upwards

A walk along the prom today gave us the opportunity to check out progress on the bandstand.  As predicted it still isn't fully complete - but you can see that the end is in sight.

The 'cofferdam' that surrounded it, holding back the sea during the building works, has gone in the last week as well - just in time for Storm 'Imogen' tomorrow . . .

And since Christmas our Tesco has also finally made an appearance over the builders' hoardings - in fact it's going up quite rapidly at the moment, like a giant set of Meccano.


We'll just have to wait to see if once it's built they actually open it!

Getting Set

Having sorted the baseboard for the train set, we then needed to decide how to set it up - primarily so it could be 'deconstructed' if we ever have guests staying in the room!

We'd been through options such as pulleys to haul it up to the ceiling, foldable legs, etc. In the end went with a couple of portable trestles, (which were simple, cheap, and work a treat).

So . . . on to the next step - covering the board in cork sheets.


We'd finally got four rolls of cork of an appropriate size (bit of a 'fail' on our first purchase, where we'd misread 75mm width as 75cm!) . . . , which we were going to glue to the baseboard to provide a decent surface and some sound 'dampening'.   

Out with the PVA and one roll down - needed plenty of tins and jars to weigh it down and prevent it bubbling up, mind you.

  

Once that one was dryish, on to sheet two - then we did three and four together, as they were covering a smaller area (and we managed to find some more tins!)

Job done - looking good - next job finalising the track layout (not sure yet about the one shown here):