Elmer Lane 29 - Sanding tower and bits

DB returns to shoo away the tumbleweeds:

A few projects have been quietly ticking away in the background over the last few weeks, so here is an update on a few.

I've been threatening to add a sanding tower to Elmer Lane for some time now, and I was under the misapprehension this could be knocked off quite quickly.

There was a bit of pondering of course. This is a fiddly structure, and being in the thick of the action, would be prone to being knocked. Styrene is my go to, so a top was assembled quickly, but this wouldn't be ideal for the legs.  I considered brass, and then finally settled on the steel wire I'd been using as point rodding. I was going to face this with some styrene H sections, but that made the legs look too chunky. 

The legs are splayed in both dimensions:

The real thing serves three through tracks off the turntable, but as I figured there would be all sorts of clearance issues around it, I decided to minimise the impact of this and make the third road a new dummy stub out of some ancient Micro Engineering code 40 track.

Installed. While there is plenty of clearance for a DM and SpaceRacer next door, not much will fit underneath it because of the legs on a curve. This may prove to be a pain. But then again, I'm not sure how much the turntable will be used in the real world, and besides, there are still the 'original' three roads that can be used, and steam locos can be sanded from one of them if they want to be. I could have moved it further from the table onto a straighter bit of track, but that would encroach on the 'diesels' end of the module. 

I need a sand cooking shed next.

In other news, as you can see from the two photo above, the crew quarters now has some crew chatting out the front. They seem to have shiny polyester suits from the 80s on here, so they might expect a rain of dullcote soon.

And some recycled (about 4 times) Atlas N scale poles have been planted beside the Hoki line.