I ain't dead yet

 Well, after quite a few months of radio silence, I'm back. And while NZ120 has not figured largely in my modeling over the last 8 months, I thought it was time to take stock of where things are.

The last time I looked at my railway houses I had painted them and it seemed like it was full steam ahead. we then arrived at paralysis by analysis. I wanted to create a separate base to move the buildinsg off the layout to work on them. I got stuck on what the sub base should be. MDF is all well and good but what if it starts warping? Can I find something rigid enough? 

And there it sat untill last week when I had a bit of an epifany that I didn't need to do it on 1 large piece, I could do it at 1 base per house section. This would minimise the warpage over a shorter length.

Looking at my shots from Retrolens I calculated some rough measurements based on the size of the NZR houses. Unlike other authors who have the luxury of freescaling their buildings, the bog standard railway house is a fixed size and square and so I'm stuck with them dimension wise.

I had a stash of 2mm MDF, liberated from my previous employer when I was made redundant last year, which was about the right depth and I could get 2 sections from 1 piece of MDF. As good a reason as any. I painted both sides green as a base coat and as everybody should know, painting both sides of MDF sheet "stops" warping mostly. I then mapped out the house locations on each section and glued them down.

The only issue is that the backyards are not long enough. It can't be helped, move on.

Oh, and in other news, after 8 months I have a job. It's in Palmy and still in scince, just a sideways shuffle to a production role with a startup.