Dear Friends,

It has been a while since we have heard from Thomas on the Ffarquhar branch. There have been many happenings such as Thomas went to an exhibition, Daisy arrived, and... but I shan't tell you anymore, you will have to read it for yourselves.

Flyingscotsmanfan.

A lot of progress, and I mean A LOT, has been made to Ffarquhar before it went to the Colne Valley Railway's Model Railway exhibition in June. A lot of scenic work was done including, ballasting, the Tunnel mouth, the retaining wall and some basic ground covering.

A road was built using the Faller Car System as the basis so eventually Bertie the Bus can be seen trundling along the road. Bertie has been fitted with a chassis though unfortunatly too much tinkering with it means it doesn't perform well at all, but I know where I have went wrong and so the mark II chassis will hopefully make Bertie fully operational.

The layout ran faultlessly at the exhibition apart from the odd bit of dirty track which made Percy stop a couple of times but a good track and wheel clean eliminated that! The 3 link couplings were an absolute joy to work all day and I only missed one coupling!

The overall feedback for the layout was very good and even though it was Thomas and Friends my club mates were quite impressed! I even had one little lad come back about 6 or 7 times throughout the day for about twenty minutes at a time and it turns out his favourite engine is Stepney (which did run on Thomas' Branch in the original books whilst visiting Sodor, see STEPNEY THE BLUEBELL ENGINE) so its lucky that I took Stepney and I made sure he was running whenever he came over.

Currently this is what the layout looks like in a series of pictures taken today:

As you can see a lot has been done with a lot still to go!

Now you may have noticed in one of teh pictures that Daisy is in the station:

She isn't available commercially as yet so I took a Lima Class 101, cut the cab off the end of the Trailing Unit and stuck it onto the end of the Driving Unit in a not to dissimiar manner as The Reverend did his though his was with the old Tri-ang model. I think she happens to look rather good!

Lastly for this update; I have decided that due to some ply I had laying around not doing much that I shall plan a little extension to Ffarquhar which will give an extra 3 1/2 ft scenic space and also a place for a riverbridge and river, as well as a place for the quarry line to join the line so that Mavis can bring her stone trucks down. I have got as far as drawing on the baord what I want where:

So all in all Ffarquhar has a lot of life in her yet and hopefully the extension will be up and running by her next show in September!

Until next time... hopefully it won't be so long!