As in another show successfully completed rather than something more OK Coral! Very busy all weekend but very enjoyable as the visitors seemed to be particularly pleasant and interested and heaped more than enough praise on my efforts to over inflate my ego!

Everything was very nicely helped along by Andy, David, Danial and Jareth - a big thank you to all of them.

Not 100% smooth though, on Saturday morning many locos just were not as smooth as I would have liked. Luckily I had enough spares to temporarily retire them until I was able to do a bit of a thorough clean after the show closed. I had given everything a bit of a going over the previous week but I guess trying to hold them in one hand while applying power and trying to clean the wheels is not ideal. On seeing the £20+ cost of a Peco cradle I invented this - didn't take too long!

As you can probably see it is a box with a bit of foam in it and a length of track strengthened with a bit of copper clad strip which doubles as a point to attach a test lead with a bit of power in it. Simple and much cheaper!

Another interesting one was a mysterious short which disappeared a couple of times and then returned. It turned out to be one bogie that had gone live on one side due to brake gear touching a wheel. When it coupled directly to a loco that was live on the other side it shorted through the coupling. Talking of couplings, these were a bit of a pain on the Sunday which was very annoying as I thought I had got them pretty much sorted. Back to the test track then this week and much shoving and jiggling of wagons has followed.

One other hiccup was that the Baldwin Gas Mechanical thew it's cranks quite early on. I had spoken to Neil Sayer, the producer of this kit, at Apedale and he said that he had some new ones made from GRP. A quick message on Monday had a new set on the doorstep on Wednesday morning - brilliant, thank you! Here is one great low-tech way of getting the crank pins perpendicular involving a small block of wood and six holes that will just clear the pins drilled vertically into it;

So with all this remedial activity I am looking forward to running bliss at EXPO NG at Swanley next weekend.