The last month has been spent carrying out the scenic work and making all the fiddly little details that add life to the scene but take quite a while to produce.
The majority of the station fencing was recovered from the removed second platform at Culdaff. This needed to be cleaned up and repainted and then reconfigured to suit the new site; a small new section of fencing had to be added to this and a gate made to give access to the General Manager's office which is located at the bottom of the station garden.
The station lamps are Roundhouse kits, the two in the loco yard are finished in red primer but the three platform lamps received seven coats of acrylic moss green (the paint was very thin). I have fitted the lamps with 18v grain of wheat bulbs rather than the supplied LEDs, the LEDS will be used elsewhere in the future.
The photos were cropped to size and scaled down, and then printed on high quality photo paper. Once the images were cut out using a scalpel, they were given a coating of Artist's clear glaze spray; when dry, the signs were glued to 30 thou black Plastikard sheet and glued to the station fencing. Curiously, all the signs advertise beverages of some kind or another, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic.
The station names on the benches and the large nameboard were made in the same way, but these were produced in Open Office Writer on the PC, this could probably also be done in MS Word, but Open Office Writer delivered just the right shade of green for me.
I also reduced and printed on plain paper, a GSR poster advertising the delights of travel in Ireland and a timetable, this is a scaled down copy of the July 1929 timetable for the Castlederg and Victoria Bridge Tramway. These were mounted on small pieces of Plastikard and stuck either side of the waiting room door.
The loco shed was given a floor by building up layers of plastic sheet to rail level between the rails and laying a piece of OSB between the two tracks, the rest of the shed floor and the loco yard was infilled with repair cement and then soaked with the spray bottle. Once dry, the shed and yard area was given a wash of diluted black masonry paint.
With the exception of making a small diorama a couple of years ago, this is the first bit of indoor scenic modelling I have done since the early 1980s, and that was in the smaller scales. The finished result is not to exhibition standards but I think it conveys enough atmosphere to make it fairly convincing. I can now say that the railway is complete, but not finished, another possible extension is being planned for development in 2017/18!