Garden Rail 277 a new Editor

[PaulRhB]

Welcome Phil Parker as the Editor. As Phil is active on here and known for his little projects hopefully more visibility on here too.

Good selection of articles without a need to wipe away all the good bits

I like the comment about coming from the bargain basement end and one thing that GR has always been good at promoting and making first class models from the kits available at that end.

[Owd Bob]

i'll have to track it down and have a read/look Paul, but bargain basement through my eyes is modeling using free stuff from the skips & dust bins.

[Phil Parker]

Thanks for the welcome and apologies it's taken so long for me to get on here to say hello. Been a hectic week including getting locked in a car park with Andy Y. 

 

If you've read my writing elsewhere, you'll know that I'm a big fan of making things rather than buying them and that approach will carry across to Garden Rail. Fortunately for me, you simply can't build a garden line without getting your hands dirty. Even the most basic LGB setup requires putting the track together and if you do anything outside, probably some work involving aggregates. For most people though, there is stock to build, or at least modify, buildings to erect and a thousand other hands-on tasks, most of which are enjoyable. At the end of this, you get to see your own line in operation.

 

Garden railways seem especially suited to this approach. You can pick up some superb value-for-money models from a number of sources. If you judge value by the size of the model than the larger scales can look like absolute bargains. The Swift Sixteen wagon I've built in this issue is many times the size of a similarly priced OO model. Motive power can come from cheap laser-cut kits to RTR live steam, all of which are great fun.

 

My aim will be to cover the entire spectrum of the garden scale hobby (note, I didn't say outdoor...) to enthuse readers and get them modelling. I'll do my best to be here for questions and suggestions. The pages of Garden Rail are very open to people who wish to write up their efforts. At the moment I could really do with a few of you taking photos of your railways and writing them up but since you see one of the first articles I've included involves making a clockwork powered tramcar, you can see that we will definitely be looking for the occasional odd-ball topic.

 

Now, if you excuse me. I have a newly arrived Saltford Models kit I need to build...

[Huw Griffiths]

The pages of Garden Rail are very open to people who wish to write up their efforts. At the moment I could really do with a few of you taking photos of your railways and writing them up but since you see one of the first articles I've included involves making a clockwork powered tramcar, you can see that we will definitely be looking for the occasional odd-ball topic.

 

Now, if you excuse me. I have a newly arrived Saltford Models kit I need to build...

 

… soon to be seen running on concentric turned wheels - and with a build article booked to appear in a magazine, in the very near future, no doubt.

 

As for the clockwork tramcar, that just doesn't sound right. What could possibly be wrong with 550V dc live overhead, as on some of the real things? (Well, apart from some "medium voltage" electrification adding a new "buzz" to the layout, that is … .)

 

Seriously though, nobody wants an unexpected "fry up". OK - I know that it's actually the current that does the "damage" - but 550V would be a high enough potential difference to really get those electrons flowing. There's also the little matter of this electrical engineer having a healthy caution when it comes to electricity (that shouldn't come as a shock).

 

Anyway, I haven't seen this edition yet - I might see it in the town centre WHS.

 

 

Huw.

[PaulRhB]

i'll have to track it down and have a read/look Paul, but bargain basement through my eyes is modeling using free stuff from the skips & dust bins.

Yeah free is always a good bargain

Mike Duffy's series of building articles were based on a lot of free recycled packing material.

Edited August 18, 2017 by PaulRhB

[ColinK]

Glad you said 'garden scales' Phil as I had a garden railway in my previous house, but the current house has no garden so the G scale is going indoors. I'm currently building a low relief station building from foamboard, balsa and coffee stirrers. Not woring out as cheap as I hoped though.