It is bigger than you think

 It has been an odd seven days. Odd in a way I can't quite put my finger on.

It started with the Chatsworth Country Fair.

We got free entry as part of our annual membership. Otherwise I don't think it would make sense to spend £37 each to effectively get entry to what is basicaly a pop up shopping centre. I remeber when country fairs actually seemed to have some connection to the country. OK, there were a few stalls of that kind, I'm always a sucker for the ferrets, but mostly it was endless rows of shops selling nearly identical tat.

At least there were some good displays of vintage vehicles, but they felt very much like an afterthought.

 
On Sunday I finally assembled the Tim Horn baseboard for the Penrhyn themed OO9 layout.

And that explains the title of this post

There is a lot more vertical space to fill than I'd realised,

I'm struggling to work out how to handle the issue. I really don't want to use a tunnel. Apart from knowing that every derailment would happen in it, it would ruin some of the views I want to recreate of a train glimpsed in the landscape through a dense foreground of trees.

I suspect I'm going to have to do something a little unconventional when I start cutting the foamboard. 

The first few OO9 layouts I built all had very strong vertical elements, but they all had major drawbacks with either the weight or the strength of the hillside.

I haven't made up my mind about including the siding.The idea was to have somewhere to display spare locos, but there is also a very specific scene I want to model, that breaks my rule about not copying another model rather than the prototype. In my defence, it is a recreation of an old MRC cover that inspired the concept of a small layout masquerading as part of a much bigger scene. But I'm not sure I can include both elements.

The rest of the week mostly consisted of a blind panic about a work task that I have to confess I eventually handed over to AI, with mixed results, and ended with a whole day and evening of committee meetings.

In between things, I've made a bit more progress on the hextrak module, and the buildings for the North Sunderland inspired layout.Knowing how I work I'm hoping that in the next few weeks I'll have a period of hyper activity and get a lot of scenic work done on multiple layouts