July to October is a long time for nothing to be posted on a blog; - Sorry.

The effects of age on our bodies - mine & my wife Margaret's that is, - is taking its toll, and there have been rather more important things than railway modelling to capture my attention in recent months. Octagenarianism is approaching much faster than did teenagerism!!

We had a visit of EMGS friends and their wives - mainly comprising the ExpoEM North team, and Honley Tank was alive to three, finescale layouts seeing shunted wagons flying all over the place. This was followed by a weekend brewing tea at ExpoEM North and that was closely followed by a weekend pretending to work on the demonstration stand at Manchester MRS's show. We will probably have recovered by Christmas!

Fairly obviously then, I'm not dead yet.

The Airfix crane and the five ccts I told you about were entered in the Manchester MRS annual competition & I came away with a gentle smile (but not a wide grin) on my face. For presentation purposes they were presented as a track maintenance train and as a short parcels train being a local cut from the well known (locally at least) "Red Bank Empties". My photographic skills fall short of being able to take decent pictures of full trains but I promise to make a try and put up some pics next time; hopefully in less than three months!

For the demo at MMRS I had decided to design a chassis for a C13 (LNER speak for ex GC 9K class). The reason was that I have two C13, neither of which is a good runner. One I built in the 1960s as OO, my very first attempt at scratch building a body, but it ran on a butchered Triang chassis. Later it became my first attempt at conversion to P4 and then later again to S4. It ran marginally better each time but it's time it got a decent chassis. The second has a body built by John Quick, on a OO chassis built by A. N. Other, and this I have never run.

I'm aiming for a common chassis design but with differing body-chassis fixing. Indeed, as I write the two sets of mainframes have been erected:-

and

Hopefully they will be completed before Christmas & then it's back to the Q4.