After the ESNG show, I turned my mind to Stuttgart.  First, a little maintenance was needed – reversing the wiring on one end of Allan’s bridge, where I’d got the standard NCI colours confused.  Then a slight rewire of my N-mod loops.  I think they’re OK now, after some problems at the show.

With the space we have allocated at Stuttgart NCI, I needed to build a new ‘joker’ board – a module that moves the track from one side of the module to the other.  As shown with my ‘monster’ module below….

Unfortunately, I needed the opposite ‘hand’ of board for the show.  I didn’t want to build a large module, so came up with this 400mm long idea – a parallelogram of a module that changed sides in a straight line…

I quickly knocked up the baseboard – only to find that I’d built it up-side-down with the wrong hand again.  So I built another one.  A little scenery followed.  The tunnel mouth could be German, but also reminds one of structures on the Brighton line.  The tunnel was very narrow, and I had to widen it at the bottom to fit an O8 diesel’s outside cranks.  Anyhow, job done.

Before the ESNG show, I had looked at Aldersford, Martin Micklewright’s NCI modules, that had been in my loft for some 10 years.  The track bed had warped, and despite an earlier attempt to strengthen the boards and straighten them, there was still a large dip in the track.  It’s a lovely model of Ford station, and I thought it worth another attempt to correct this before assigning it to the tip.

So I took the nuclear option and carefully cut out the old track bed, and replaced the cork with a new ply base, packed up to be (almost) level along the 1200mm board.

I had demolished the level crossing whilst removing the track, so I’ve replaced it with a Ratio one.  Not quite like Martin’s original or like Ford, but it will do.

We’ll see how it works at Stuttgart.  If all is OK, I’ll freshen up the scenery and replace the signal that I demolished.