Armstrong Goods 388 Class at rest in the bay

The past year has been a busy one for me, and so progress on "The Bay" has been limited. However, I did manage to get some work on the main buildings done:

Waiting room
The Lambourne Bay at Newbury featured a fairly substantial brick-built storage room at the beginning of the bay platform.

In layout-terms, the position of this building provides several benefits: It hints at the larger station buildings beyond the layout, and partly blocks the view of the siding and loading dock behind it, thereby adding to the three-dimensional feel of this quite narrow layout. The building also gives further reason for the viewer to look beneath the canopy, which is a main concept of the layout.

The Waiting Room walls

Rather than copy the storage room at Newbury directly, I found that a waiting room would be of more interest. I also decided to skip the bricks and instead loosely copy the wonderful wooden building style so typical of Didcot station not far away.

This was done quite simply by scoring the cut-to-shape plasticard sides and ends of the building to emulate the plankings, and then adding strips of further plasticard to give the panel effect. The roof is made from card strips. These simple techniques were copied from an old second-hand building I picked up a while back and were fairly quick to carry out.

Water tower
The water tower is based on a rough and simple design that was widespread on the GWR. A similar design (although of a larger, six-legged variety) was found in the Lambourne bay area at Newbury, where it served the platform water bowsers from an elevated position.

The rough-and-ready water tower, less final details

The model was put together in an evening from bits and pieces from my scrap-box, including Ratio parts for the tank itself. I rather like these simple little projects, which contribute nicely to my objective of using mainly existing or leftover parts, while still drawing on prototypical features.

Embankment walling
For the brick embankment walling I thought I'd experiment with some new options and used the vacuum formed plastic walling available from Langley. This is preformed and comes with four bays in each section.

Vacuum formed retaining walls

To be honest I am somewhat ambivalent about this product. On the one hand it is very lightweight and can be mounted with quick results. On the other hand the brickwork lacks the sharp crisp edges of plastic kits, which can be dissatisfying when viewed close up. Also, the bottom edge of the walling needs to be cut off, which in this case is difficult to do neatly as you are not working with a flat object.

To cut a long story short, on this particular layout I think it works out OK as the walling is at the back, but it may not be the best choice for embankments that are more visible at the front of a layout.