A brief entry...

There hasn't been a great deal of progress with Blanche for nearly a month now - the bosses have been laminated onto the rods, and the eccentrics soldered on to the axles, but that's about it - I spent far too long getting my boots looking like black glass for Remembrance Sunday... worth it though!

I'm oop north this weekend, so no physical work, but some planning has been going on - dusty areas of my brain, related to layout planning, have been blown clear of cobwebs, and the hum of electricity and whirr of cogs can be heard as life slowly returns to the mothballed machinery. Hafod Las is to have a rebuild, despite never being finished! Think of it as one of those Victorian locomotive blunders, where the offending article was covered in a tarpaulin, placed at the back of the works, and never spoken of again.

The current thread is here, in the 2010 Challenge forum, but I'll either merge it into this blog or create a separate one as I come to make progress. One consideration though, is to ensure that Blanche can run on it without the unsightly holes in her frames being necessary for the pony truck. Of course, this may require a 2 mile radius (I wonder what that is, scaled to 4mm/ft?) but it's worth a try.

Plus, I intend to have some better trackwork, and take better care of it during construction - the operation of some is a little iffy already. I may also seek a more reliable way of point control than badly-bodged brass wire...

Anyway, enough rambling. The proposed plan is shown below, and for anyone interested, the original layout thread (on RMweb3) can be found here. Comments, advice, abuse and postal orders are welcomed.