I’ve now, sadly, been home from Skye for about a week, we had a great time (double booking of the cottage aside – but that got sorted relatively easily!).
I spent some time taking photos for the backscene on the layout, a range of blue sky and overcast. The latter will be, I think, more appropriate for ‘The Misty Isle’. I need to stitch them together in photoshop to make a complete image that I can get printed out.
I’ve had a few thoughts about the layout whilst I was there. The ground levels aren’t quite right to represent the area 100% accurately, but I’ll have to live with that, the next HLR layout I build will hopefully be much more accurate to the real life location. I’ve also got plenty of photos of rocks, trees, grass etc. to refer to whilst doing the scenic work.
During our holiday I spent a very enjoyable few hours walking the Skye Marble Railway footpath from the very upper levels of Kilchrist Quarry, down to Kilchrist Works and on to Broadford pier. It’s a great walk, and if anyone reading this goes to Skye, it’s well worth doing. There a few surprisingly steep gradients for an old railway line, to the point where I wondered if the ground level had been altered since closure, but the trackbed still looked relatively engineered, so I’m unsure on that point.
Anyway, here are a few photos from the walk, I’ll add more to the Skye Marble Railway page in due course.
I also saw the new bridge built in the last few years to carry the footpath along over the river at Broadford. Allegedly the intention was to build this on the alignment of the old bridge, but this doesn’t seem to be the case, it is skewed off at an angle. Further evidence of this is the remains of two piers which are exposed at low tide.
Rails are still exposed at the far end of the pier at Broadford, marking the end of the line.
I also walked the route of the Talisker Distillery Tramway at Carbost, shortly after sampling some single malt on a distillery tour. The photos on the page are sadly no longer possible to recreate as some ‘improvements’ to the pier and surrounding trackbed have lead to all the rail either being removed or covered over during 2012.
More on the backscene and further thoughts on the HLR soon.
