Earlier this year was due to show my 'Shasta' layout based on the Southern Pacific's 'Shasta route' in the Sacramento River canyon north of Dunsmuir, California at the big London Festival of Railway Modelling at Alexandria Palace. Shasta is a very well known Z layout in the U.K but I was finding its length a bit limiting with the yard only able to hold trains at most about seven feet long. So work had been progressing on inserting an extra four foot in the centre to allow me to run the 'double stacks' and Lumber trains up to eleven foot with plenty of head end haulage and a couple of helpers at the rear.
The new board was going to be a very loosely representation of the former depot at Dunsmuir now in a pretty derelict state but still with some P-Way activity. Shasta would now be fourteen foot overall length and still have a Z-bend interface at one end to connect up to other modules.
However disaster struck three weeks before the show when I went to get the layout out of the purpose built layout shed that lives at the side of the house. Unbeknownst to me a solder joint on the cold water pipe had gone porous and had been spraying a fine aerosol mist of water on the back of the board for a considerable period of time, The board was wrecked! Also in the firing line had been the two new boards for the new British Z layout 'Tapton Junction' but that's another story
So London only saw the standard ten foot 'Shasta' and I sulked for a bit until more invites started coming in for the long form layout
So
Work started on a rebuild with a new section spliced in
the key was going to be to blend the new scenery in with the existing boards
The turntable is once again the Peco N one modified for Z and we see the cab forward sheds and the remnants of the roundhouse now in situ
Now starting to look the part
I'll add some more tomorrow
cheers
Kev