Well after nearly a two and a half month stay in Hospital, thanks to the fantastic and severely under appreciated NHS I have survived and live to write more blogs.
I really cant find the words to thank all the staff who looked after me and went above and beyond to provide me with the care and treatment I needed.
I have a long period of rehab ahead of me, in learning to walk again, regain control of my right arm, and build up my muscle mass again but this is a small price to pay,
So t
Well a little progress has been made on the locomotives clogging up the Workbench of DOOM, progress has been slow as three of them need lining, and trying to do this by hand in N gauge is not easy, especially with hands that seem never to stop shaking.
Anyway a decent coat of weathering will hide a multitude of my sins, so really when you come to think about it, is it really worth the effort, and boy has it been an effort. The first of the Locomotive slowly progressing towards completion is
The problem is with making locomotives is that sooner or later you have to paint them, now even though I have a thing for great lumbering freight engines life should be easy, but when do I ever make things easy for myself?
So over the last couple of weeks, there has been a little progress down and the Price paint shops, initially I thought thanks to almost constant hand spasms that I would just concentrate on simple black engines, but when do I ever make things easy for myself?
Originall
Well a couple of weeks ago, with the full permission of the fantastic Domestic Overlord I managed to add another crimson jubilee to the fleet, by rescuing her from Evil Bay at a very reasonable cost.
She sat at the back of the workbench of doom for a couple of weeks while I got on with a few other jobs and decided on which identity to allocate to her, well the waiting is over, her identity has been chosen and her numbers applied. Now this should have been the last Jubilee to enter the fleet
I don't know how I managed to do it, but from out of the blue I found some modelling time today, so I decided to see if I could make a little more progress on the locomotives clogging up the WORKBENCH of DOOM.
Previously I had got the Princess to the stage, were I thought a coat of primer was needed to give her a little dignity at least. Today I got a little further, in the process of getting her ready to enter the fleet.
I managed to spray a nice coat of crimson onto her today and she i
Well I may have missed the Wigan Show this weekend, and all the bargains but I have managed to find some modelling time. The Domestic Overlord has been a little poorly, so because I am such a good Boy I have been looking after him, and providing many, many hot toddies. The problem with this is it made the DO very sleepy and he could barley keep his little eyes open (insert Evil Laugh here > > ) and this is where my plan fell into place. While the DO snored away in the land of nod, and t
Well while the industrial accident investigators are still to allow the Price locomotive works to re-open, I have been doing some thinking. In the collection I have a total of 6 Duchess locomotives.
Four of which I am pretty happy with, they still need a few little tweaks but they represent locomotives in the following conditions.
1 x In original build condition pre-smoke deflectors (crimson). 1 x Smoke deflector fitted (crimson). 2 x Semi-condition (post war lines black)
That leaves
Well despite the reputation of the Work Bench of DOOM, I ignored the many, many warnings issued especially by the Domestic Overlord and ploughed into a production shift.
The Princess I'm trying to build is getting to the stage I should start to maybe consider giving her a coat of primer, that is if you ignore all the filler I will have to apply to various places to try and improve some of the more ropey areas (quite a lot of them). Anyway I thought it was a good idea to see if she would fit
I don't know how I managed to do it this weekend but I seemed to have found some modelling time, and managed to make a little progress on some of my list of projects. I have a few GEM Fowler tender kits in stock which I have had for more years than I care to remember, originally I thought that I would use them on my 4F fleet but I have never got round to it. One by one I have been using them on various other projects so now I have more 4Fs than I have tenders in stock. Anyway today I have nearly
Well my stock taking continues, and the number of locomotives I forgot I had is slowly increasing, which is good news I think?
Before the stock count I thought I had 5 Duchess locomotives, but it turns out that I actually have 6, I had a very vague memory of finding a bargain Duchess in the old Farish lined black livery (you know the one with the yellow/green lining). I honestly thought though that I had converted this into a "Semi" and painted it into Post War lined black but apparently I d
Well thanks to a little coercion from various people on here (you know who you are) I have secured another Jubilee from EvilBay for the fleet. Being a very very good Boy I told the Domestic Overlord what I had done, and I was told that it does not matter as I could have as many trains as I wanted, HOW Lucky am I?
Anyway before I go on a mad Jubilee shopping spree (don't worry it wont happen, as I like having money I have not used yet too much) I thought I would start a proper stock count of
I probably won't have long to type this post before the Domestic Overlord, or as he will be known from now as the Prison Guvnor confiscates my laptop as well as everything else
I am normally too sensible to believe in all these conspiracy theories that keep going around and around and usually put them down to cranks with nothing better to do, BUT now I see them as the work of true visionaries who want nothing more than to help humanity and people like me
I never thought I would find a
Well over the next few weeks there will be a lot less posts from me (I can hear the cheering already) as my Foster Street, and Lugsdale Road layouts are going into hibernation.
As the Domestic Overlord and I are in the process of looking at a new mansion, the layouts along with a lot of other stuff will be going into a storage locker
Will they ever see the light of day again? Is this just a plot by the Domestic Overlord to lock me away in a container? Will I be given to some unwitting c
I don't know how, but I must have really upset the Gods of Railway modelling, as they have decided to severely restrict the amount of time I have free to model. However risking further wrath from the Gods or worst still the Domestic Overlord, I managed to find the smallest amount of spare time since my last update, and I have even had what I thought was a good idea.
Stand by your beds, first things first the good idea, whilst I was pretending to take in the details on a recent house viewing
Apparently its a Bank Holiday weekend, and we all know what that means........yes your right having to take your better half round IKEA, well I'm sure there are people out there who actually like visiting Ikea, but I bet they also think the world is flat, or even flat packed. I on the other hand do not count myself amongst the fruitcakes so have a healthy aversion to the place.
The Domestic Overlord thinks its a good place (I'm not saying he's a fruitcake...honest), so we are planned to visi
Well this could be my last ever blog update, (I can hear the cheers from here already), because if the Domestic Overlord ever reads this I'm DEAD.
Did you read that Mikkel my tragic demise may be imminent and I blame you for all of this, thanks to the encouragement I have managed to get a little modelling time, and I spent it playing with my cobbels. progress has not exactly been rapid, but I have managed to use up my supply of cobbles, I'm still not 100% happy with how it looks, but if I d
Well I managed to get some paint out today, and not the stuff you put on house walls but the stuff you put on models, if the Domestic Overlord finds out I will be in for it, but for the moment I am a painting God.
I thought if I was lucky I might get the first coat of cream applied to the station buildings, if nothing else, and I actually achieved this and a little more besides. The process was helped by using acrylics, which still amaze me with how quick they dry. At this rate I will be ab
Well despite MetrOLands very generous help on my last post, I am still having problems thinking about how I will wire the layout, I knew that Electro-frogs would be a little harder than my usual Insul-frog points but who would have thought it would be this hard?
So any ideas, I have managed to scribble down the track plan, unless it changes again, it does not look that complicated does it? I think this weekend I may have to engaged my brain and work out this wiring mumbo jumbo. I must admi
Well in one of my more recent posts, a regular contributor on here who will remain nameless, oh what they hell it was MIKKEL, said that my station canopy was curvy, how rude To be fair, he was right (I cant believe I have committed that to writing), but on the other hand he was just stating the obvious.....so I thought I better do something obvious to try and fix it. As luck would have it the Domestic Overlord was a little poorly today (not that the DO being sick is lucky for me), so Price t
I really don't know how I did it, but I managed to find a little time to spend on the layout over the weekend (well I suppose its not really a layout yet if ever), and typical of me rather than spend it on something useful I used it all up working on a little redevelopment.
My intention for Lugsdale road was to depict a little LMS station on the outskirts of a typical Northwest industrial town surrounded by terraced houses and typical industrial buildings. On the far side of the station I ha
Well it seems to me that it has been a very long time since my last update, but I can hear people screaming from here that it has not been long enough, still I will ignore the screams of complaint and carry on.
So what had been the reason for such a long period since updates, its not because I was abducted by Aliens and taken back to my home planet for a little holiday, because as the Domestic Overlord remarked, they went through all the effort to dump me here in the first place, why would t
Well I don't know how I managed to do it, but I managed to find some modelling time and managed to spend it productively for once. In my previous post I mentioned that I had decided to that the station buildings should be modelled on those used by the LNWR.
As most people know, they built some of their stations from standardised wooden panels, and as a result they could erect buildings that suited their intended environments quickly and cheaply. I must admit being a prudent (some people say
Well as I mentioned in my last post, I had managed to pull of the crime of the century and managed to get away with just applying emulsion paint to the backscenes on Lugsdale road.
The good news is that the heat has died down now and the Domestic Overlord is still none the wiser, but not wishing to tempt fate further painting of the backscene will be strategically delayed for a while. What I have managed to do while laying low avoiding the fuzz is to work on what seems like the endless supp
Don't tell anyone especially the Domestic Overlord, but being the sneaky little chap that I am, I managed over the weekend to actually do some emulsion painting.
In my opinion this was massively successful for at least two reasons, the first being that the painting was the actually to the backscenes on Lugsdale Road and not a wall in Price mansions, but far more cunningly without the DO getting even the merest sniff of my exploits.
To be honest I'm not sure how I managed it, as I have th
Modelling time, in fact any free time has been in very short supply lately, despite a career change that in theory would have given me more time to model, I appear to have an uncanny ability to fill this time with lots of none modelling stuff .
As a result of this, perhaps I should have tittle this blog entry as "spot the progress"? One of the jobs I have nearly completed is the addition of the end backscene panel on board number 1. As I have used 4mm ply for this rather than my usual 6mm I
