Rede Valley plans for Christmas

First day of my Christmas break and its snowing in deepest Northumberland.

Time to take stock and consider what’s to be achieved over the next couple of weeks. The loft hatch has been firmly shut for the last 3 or 4 months because of other priorities, and its time to do something about it. Starting the blog properly is part of giving myself the motivation to get things moving again.

First job today was to start documenting the real locations that the rede valley line is based around, so I’ve added a page to the site covering Chathill Station. The basics are there and hopefully the content will increase over the next few days.

Second job, tidy the loft so I could actually get near the layout to switch the controls on. Following a couple of hours of moving stuff that had just been pushed through the loft hatch over the last couple of years I switched on the railway pc, and left it to update itself.

Third job, record where the layout has got to so far with a few photos.

: Rede Head Viaduct

Rede Head Viaduct will have Shankend on the Waverley line as its basis. The bridge is a Wills kit, and still needs some work to hide the joins.

: Rede Head Summit

Beyond the viaduct, leading into the northern end of the fiddle yard is Rede Head Summit, again the influence is Waverley, the prototype Whitrope.

: Fiddle yard south

A3 Flying Fox heads the Queen of Scots, While A1 Great Northern waits to depart with a north bound express. The area is loosely referred to as the fiddle yard at present, but eventually will be fully scenic, and split in half so that the north end and south end will appear to be two separate stations. One half will be Monkchester, the name for Newcastle before the castle was built, and the other end Grassmarket, representing somewhere in the Edinburgh area.

Departing from the south end of the fiddle yard, trains will pass the locomotive depot, which at present is a large open space