The plan is to embed the bridge in landscape and join the West of England tracks to my existing Misterton layout. To achieve this I need to replace my Hewish Gates layout with the bridge layout.
Buildings, trees and lineside furniture were not stuck down so lifted off easily. Some fences and hedges were stuck with PVA but peeled away easily without damage.
It is my practise to lightly stick paper all over the baseboard and build the the scenery upon it. When it is time to break up the layout the scenery is easily removed by breaking the bond between paper and baseboard thus leaving behind a clean baseboard. I can't remember what I used to stick the paper down but it came off extremely easily taking the embankments and tunnel with it (I remember on Misterton I used small blobs of PVA here and there to fix the paper in place).
Ballast had been set in place with 50/50 PVA and water. Using bradawl and small chisel the ballast was loosened and hovered up into a clean bag. The bag was then emptied and ballast sieved to remove dust and large lumps with the sieved ballast ready for reuse on the new layout.
The new layout baseboards will be in three parts instead of the two here. I plan to modify the existing baseboards for sections 1 and 3 and make a new baseboard for section 2. Section 2 will contain the bridge.
The rolled up paper in the photo is the track plan for Section 2. This will be stuck to the new baseboard for track positioning.
Never an easy decision to break up a layout after spending considerable time building and admiring it. To settle my mind I broke it up in stages over several weeks for a job that could be done in a day. What also helped was the ease of disassembly that resulted in parts being undamaged and available for future use.
Here are some views of Hewish Gates before the axe fell.
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| Embankment |
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| Crewkerne Tunnel |
