To make it easier to access for modelling and painting, I set out to complete the courtyard of my New Dilbar fort first before cementing all the walls in place. I used modelling putty to give the doors the suggestion of door-handles. When looking for inspiration, I noticed that many commercial plastic N-scale doors didn’t have door-handles. It seemed strange to me that the commercial modelling process could manage N-scale rivets but not door-handles – especially when, to my mind, they seemed essential in making what would other- wise be a flat rectangle look like a door. I had some putty left over so I modelled a ring of stones around the top of the fort’s water well. Unfortunately I ran out of putty but instead of mixing up some more, I masked the gap with a cover for the well. Of course in desert terrain, it’s important to cover wells to protect the water from all the sand blowing about. To give my fort a hint of the modern age, I decided that the well’s cover would be a sheet of corrugated iron. I used a piece of a Ratio plastic N-scale corrugated sheet. The Ratio sheet was fairly thick so I trimmed the edges with an angled cut and sunk the sheet into the expanded-polystyrene base to try to make it look as thin as the real thing.