At Last! I have found two moments to rub together to make time for a blog. My silence over the last few weeks has been down to an unfortunate state of being stupidly busy and thus no modelling worth talking about. But, has not been entirely railway free, so here is a very potted history of last couple of months with a few pics thrown in and, if you make it that far, even a bit of modelling.

Much to my Francophile wife's disappointment there has just not been the opportunity to cross the channel this Summer so seem to have made up for it with rather a lot of short trips to North Wales, to which I objected mightily of course. You can almost hear me complaining as I took this pic of Lew double heading Vale of Ffestiniog across the road in Porthmadoc;

And the anguish when Merddin Emrys came in;

To calm myself I had to then take everyone to a nice relaxing National Trust property - as it happened Penryhn Castle (very impressive in a Victorian bling sort of way), and it's surprisingly large collection of locos and other assorted bits of interest. It was all so distressing I don't seem to be able to show any pics of this bit.

Having just got over all of this I was dragged kicking and screaming to the Welsh Highland Railways do with lots of unusual loco combinations and a whole load of appropriate layouts i the shed at Dinas;

But the torment didn't stop there - my noisy neighbours, the Severn Valley Railway, have been so inconsiderate as to have their steam gala over four days this year;

They deserve an ASBO for the all night running alone.

Am just trying to gear myself up for the layouts next outing which is 24th October at Welshpool. Building on the fact that the most consistently good runners have been the Black Beetle powered Simplex I have decided to add two more. As a nice easy project I thought I would resurrect what was in fact my first white metal kit of the modern era which was a Wrightlines Protected. This one had an unfortunate start to it's show career when I dropped it unpacking at Tracks to the Trenches last year so has played no further part in hostilities. My plan is to straighten it all out and convert it to the armored version just to ring the changes. This is all the bits;

And this is the mess that has to be made to get a Black Beetle to fit;

Having only a few pictures to work from is another challenge that is developing nicely as can be seen from this rather blurry pic of my fitting the angle section that the armoured top is attached to.

I know, you will all have spotted immediately that that it should fit on top of the bodywork and not in the gap. Damn, if I hadn't have mentioned it, no one would have noticed.

Guess I need to put that right - actually as it is only 1AM I might just nip down the station to see what is in .............