The road to Bryn Nadolig

Although it may be too early to be thinking about carving the Christmas or Thanksgiving turkey, for myself, it's been a long overdue task to commence work on carving the hills of Bryn Nadolig. Like any project however, making a start on something is sometimes all the momentum that is needed to get going.

The road to Bryn Nadolig will come to an end at the top of this gently sloping lane.

The little white Hornby OO scale Scottish Croft building will be the main feature tucked away in the gentle hills of this Welsh Highlands OO9 layout, with its miniature inhabitants soon to be responsible for the decorated Christmas tree that will grace my fictitious Christmas Hill layout. For this small tabletop layout to work, I simply needed to separate one side of the board's 550 mm x 1150 mm base from the other. So, after the road crosses the railway line to arrive behind the curved Bryn Nadolig train station, it continues a short distance up a gently sloping laneway to reach the small white cottage.

Using 2 sheets of the pink foam insulation board enabled me to design the layout of the little village on split levels, and the laneway was carved with a long-bladed hobby knife alongside the edge of the railway line to allow the section to be carved more conveniently.

A bit more carving and sanding helped fashion this sheep track into the side of the hill.

Being conscious not to make the whole thing look like a layered cake, I was able to continue carving and sanding until I achieved this gentle sheep track that will lead away from the farmer's cottage, up the hill to the cutting tucked into the corner of the layout. And in wanting to add a bit of charm to my heritage-themed line, I will model a stone arched sheep bridge spanning the tracks in the corner.

The rock making process I am going to follow next, is the same method I outlined in my book Model Railway Scenery Secrets. If you haven't yet bought a copy of this book, then the multiple chapters explaining the step-by-step process are far more detailed than I have the room to summarize here. The only difference I can see between this layout and what I explained in my Australian outline book, will be the colours and sharp and jagged rock cuts typical to Welsh slate quarry countryside.

The layout's timber corner frames were then puttied, sanded and cleaned ready to be painted to match in with the rest of the layout. And being a small layout made it easy for me to flip the whole thing upside down to wire the track feeder wires for the layout.

In all, carving the road to Bryn Nadolig was a half-weekend affair, with a bit of work done on the Saturday, and some final carving and sanding finished the next day after allowing my back to have a bit of a break while spending the afternoon enjoying a sneaky Prosecco with my wife.

This week's plan is to test run my two sound equipped narrow gauge steam locomotives and ensure I am happy with everything before getting stuck into the lineside feature rock face and slate retaining walls. There is a final photoshoot to be done on my Philden Beach layout, and a final decision to be made on moving forward into a new chapter of living with smaller-sized layouts. It's bound to be a very busy November on the blog with lots of short updates.

Until next time...

See also; Sacrificing length for functionality and Breaking ground on Bryn Nadolig