Throughout 1984, ‘85 and ‘86 the Portuguese Caledonian Cambrian Taff Vale Railway was worked heavily. Being a long roundy-roundy layout the locomotives worked in real time, hence a journey from Cardiff to Swindon (around the guest bedroom) would take over an hour – although all the intervening stations looked remarkably similar.

The locomotives accumulated a lot of running hours pulling heavy trains (I liked to load my wagons where possible, running up to 25 wagons on a train) and those puny Mainline mechanisms were soon on their last legs. I recorded the running hours of all the locomotives for some arcane reason, and some had put in a few months effort.

Fresh locomotives were brought in to keep services going, not necessarily in order to fill gaps in the roster, but because I liked stuff.

Who could resist this occasional interloper? My lack of location discipline means that there will always be interlopers on dubious pretexts

Hmm, as an aside, the ‘Ports to Ports Express’ – now that would be a thing to model:-

A future project, perhaps. The Ports to Ports Express must have been a lively train in its day

There were a few other locomotives, but these were the locomotives putting in the shifts of the day.

Passenger stock – a nice long rake of the expensive Mainline Colletts, a variety of Mk 1’s from Lima, Mainline and Replica, a B-set, Autocoach, and a Farish (Grafar as they called themselves) OO Pullman Car that came from I know not where. Not excessive but enough to fill the carriage sidings.

Freight stock – a wide variety of BR grey and bauxite, and far too many private owner wagons for a nationalised railway, but 7 plank private owner wagons are a particular weakness of mine, particularly Welsh ones. They were almost all out of era, but I cunningly hid them from the Portuguese branch of Rivet Counters International.

And then, in the charming and romantic setting of Heathrow Terminal 1, I blurted out some vague sketchy notions of marriage to the girlfriend, who took it all too literally. Within a year the deed was done, Child Mk. 1 was on its way, and the railway, after its long, busy moment in the sun, was back in its boxes on the shelf.
Some have remained in those boxes to this day.