The postie hasn’t brought everything I had hoped to have in stock for this weekends work but we did have a few deliveries. One of those items was some XPS foam. UK modelers know how difficult it is to get this material in the UK let alone here in Orkney. There are some suppliers in southern England but its not available locally in Northern Scotland.

Over the Christmas period I found some XPS foam available from Amazon. Its only available in 6-10-20mm thickness and 1220x600mm boards. So useful for N maybe but probably not the 50mm thickness sought by large scales. You can buy it here

So obviously we need to cut each board down to to 300mm width. The boards were marked down the center and then cut with a hot knife. My number 2 assistant supervised this job.

When cutting foam make sure the area is well ventilated as you are effectively melting plastic, so there are some toxic fumes. Of course you could use a normal knife but its alot quicker and easier to use a hot knife.

Once the boards were cut down some had to be trimmed to fit my 1600 and 1200mm MDF models they will be glued to. I used a hot wire cutter for this and a straight edge it makes a much neater cut that the hot knife but it can only cut within 100mm of the edge of each board.

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I think its looking quite smart in here now. There is a long way to go and plenty of electrical wiring to fit so these are not getting glued down just yet. Having them cut and fitted though does mean I can mark out for the roadbed, whilst I wait for more materials to arrive.

The layout is small by some standards but being N scale there is alot of material needed to complete the layout and the current shipping delays and shortages of some key components such as Code 55 track likely mean that progress on the waukesha sub will be quite sporadic.

We may even end up doing scenery with no track down if some doesn’t become available soon.

Well next job is to fit some backscene and deck two supports to the area above the workshop so we don’t need to get to that area again. Fitting those will mean the layout comes apart so watch out for that in tomorrow’s update.