Well not actually a strike, but the spring and early summer months always see my visits to the workshop to actually carry out modelling work, are shorter and less frequent.

I could report here how well my tomatoes, sweet peas, Dahlias etc are doing but it's hardly model railways is it? To keep to the modelling theme I could report on all the bits of layout maintenance I've carried out, but we all have to do those jobs and it would be an uninteresting report.

There then are my excuses for not having blogged recently.

Increasingly, I'm aware of age interfering with my abilities and, while I may not yet be quite there, I'm not far off having scratch-built my last loco. This is causing me to try to re-asses my hobby which for so many years has essentially been finescale model engineering and layout building, involving skills which I am slowly losing, making a change in my expectations a necessity.

If you give any thoughts towards a study of model railways as a hobby then you begin to realise that it is actually a myriad of hobbies and only a very small number of modellers have expertise in all of them. For many years now mine has been scratch, or semi-scratch-kit building, of locomotives associated with Gorton steam sheds, but this has led me into to other branches of the hobby so that my locos have some where to run

Many years ago I was content to have RTR (very little available and what was, was very much "toy trains" rather than models - Hornby-Dublo and Triang!). These I ran on my efforts at layouts which were scale models of a real place, examples that reached the model press being-: Holmfirth (TT); Hayfield (OO but scale, home-made track); Lockwood (OO on scale track); Birch Vale (OO on Peco flexitrack).

Many readers will recognise "Birch Vale", and this became my test bed to a move to 18.83 gauge, initially in P4 and then later to S4. Eventually the whole track bed was removed and replaced with good quality birch ply and the new track was all ply timbers with plastic chairs and steel rail laid to S4 standards.

Where I attempt to go in the future is still being pondered; for the present I'm concentrating on a large backlog of maintenance to locos, stock and layouts and perhaps getting both "Bowton's Yard" and "Wheegram Sidings" to a more completed appearance.

As part of that, I'm currently using the computer, CorelDraw and Sillhuette Portrait to produce the last building needed to make 'Bowtons Yard' look finished.

More in the future,

Dave