In honour of Tom's semi-retirement we assembled in his garage to start work on the proposed portable, indoor friendly layout. We also took the chance to finish off the minor alterations made to South Beach in August.

Ian W brought plywood for baseboards and the team set too with a will to reinforce 4 x 2 sheets with timber salvaged from Roland's. Tom very kindly supplied all of the essentials that a hardworking team of skilled craftsmen could possibly need.

Construction work took a break for lunch which gave us chance to look at Mike B's photos of Queensland cane railways and the Zig Zag in New South Wales. Fraser's day was made when an AWACs plane appeared and commenced a series of low level circuits over the area.

Back to work and now the difficult bit. How to fit what we need onto the space available?  There was a general concensous that at 13" radius the Faller curves were just too tight for most of the stock that we might want to run. But - using Setrack 30" radius meant that we would have to have more depth to the set up than we had originally planned.

Eventually we agreed that rather than being 8' wide by 4' deep (3 boards) we would need 8' by 6' (four boards) and that we needed to use some Streamline so we could get curves of about 24" radius in a couple of places. This would allow a circuit with a passing loop, headshunt, siding and a loco spur.

We are going to reconvene on Tuesday 1st November to start the track work - perhaps somebody will come up with a bright idea by then.

We will also need a name.

Thanks to Tom H for the photos and hospitality.