Random jottings

The highlight of the past few days with the route-building has been some construction work on Heyford. I've decided to migrate north and add some features to the Oxford-Banbury section: partly to add some variety to the route-building experience, partly also to make running up and down this section of line more interesting than it has been to date.
Heyford was selected because I had the opportunity to do a site visit on Saturday - 'Duchess of Sutherland' was passing through so, along with my two daughters and another dozen photographers, we waited patiently for the late-running service to breeze through.
It turns out to be a rather tricky location to model. The station is at the foot of a hill with the Oxford Canal adjacent to it and road and foot bridges crossing both railway and canal. There's lots of what I would call non-generic clutter - distinctive structures and features - which make it peculiarly 'Heyford' and a little more complicated to replicate in MSTS. But there's the fun of it. What I've now got to model are the canalside buildings and more vegetation (plenty of the latter on this section of line!). Meanwhile, 'Dorset Voyager' powers north in this magpie's eye view.


Looking at the wider MSTS scene, watch out for an excellent LT R49 stock cab likely to be released shortly - especially if you remember and appreciate London Transport (as opposed to LUL, TfL, etc.) rolling stock. More news on this available here.
Finally, some pleasing news from the Making Tracks team in today's newsletter, just delivered to me: exciting forthcoming stock pack releases and more progress on the Evesham route. MSTS aint dead just yet.