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Whilst I was at the RMweb Members' Day in Derby with Hatton Parkway I met a young man called Nathan. A teenager, he is doing his Duke of Edinburgh's award and, as part of it, is planning to build a model railway layout.

This came as a surprise to me as I had always associated the DofE awards with strenuous outdoor activities in out of the way places. In fact the award covers a number of different sections. These are:

• Volunteering - helping someone, your community or the environment 
  
• Physical - becoming fitter through sport, dance or fitness activities
  
• Skills - developing existing talents or trying something new
  
• Expedition - planning, training for and completing an adventurous journey
  
• Residential (Gold only) - staying and working away from home as part of a team

The 'Skills' section was where the model railway came in (some girls his age are learning to knit). I take my hat off to him for a brilliant idea - you can learn a lot from building a layout from carpentry through to social history - and have something tangible at the end of it.

If you know (or are) a teenager who is thinking about a DofE award then why not suggest that building a layout might be a fun way to cover the skills section?

Work continues, sporadically, on 'exhibitionising' Hatton Parkway.

In its domestic form track at baseboard joins was aligned and connected with fishplates. Given six fiddle yard roads over two joins (plus a further three lines over two joins scenic side) it was a major exercise in faffing about when the boards were rejoined, so here is the upgraded fiddle yard with hefty chuncks of copperclad (PCB) sheet epoxied in place with the rails soldered to the board. They aren't going to move out of alignment in a hurry.