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Gwiwer

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Gwiwer last won the day on January 8 2023

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  • Location
    : At the Distant (Signal) West
  • Interests
    Photography, Hill and coastal walking, Cornish history and legend, Music of most genres, Real Ales, Railway modelling, Lisa Simpson.

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  1. Added to which everything which should be concrete, castings and all, were painted using a mix of Railmatch "Concrete" and very fine sand from a Peco weathering kit to give the required texture.
  2. Sadly a lot of the earlier images were lost in a re-hosting of the site some time ago although I always hold my originals here. Yes, Dart Castings legs are used. I found a need to drill out the holes with a 0.5mm pin-vice bit before threading piano wire through. The top holes, which is where tubular steel would go rather than wire on the real thing, are reamed out to 0.8mm very carefully as there is nothing spare and brass rod used for the thicker top rail. A LOT of fine drilling is required to seat those castings into the baseboard. Patience, persistence and accurate measurement are your friends. I glued the two parts together first with Superglue rather than attempt to get the posts perfectly upright and then add the bearers. There is a little "give" in the cast material and if a bond does break another dab of superglue fixes the problem. Glue them into the baseboard holes as well! The platform deck is card scribed into "slabs" then painted in Railmatch "Concrete", weathered with powders including a touch of green along the scribed paver edges and a white lining pen used for the warning line along the edges. I tried with foam-board but it wouldn't lie flat. The card took a while to settle down too but superglued to the castings and with a heavy flat steel ruler rested along it the bond was made and the surface has remained flat enough for credibility.
  3. I would never seek to copy the work of another directly but were I to build a model of somewhere I already knew to have been modelled then I see that as absolutely ok. I did respectfully back away from using a fictitious name I had chosen upon learning that it was already in use for another layout. I could still have gone ahead because the name itself was not subject to any form of legal protection. All it cost me to effect the change was a still-unused sheet of stick-on signs. Not a problem at all.
  4. Following this with interest Please feel free to also browse my "Waddlemarsh" topic which includes a scratch-built halt of SR "Exmouth Junction" style modelled more or less on those along the Sussex coast including Aldrington pictured in this topic. I am happy to share techniques and thoughts.
  5. No doubt because it is easier to produce everything at once with the tooling and staffing all set up rather than to make one batch in this colour then break it all down, come back and set up again in six months or a year and run another smaller batch.
  6. Without wishing to hijack this thread in an inappropriate direction I'll just say this much. We had stayed in holiday accommodation for many years before buying the cottage. This was always one of the units (barn, cottage or farmhouse) provided by a good friend who rented her otherwise redundant farm buildings to sustain the smallholding side of things. As a business model it worked well and still does. She gets to live on the farm she and her late husband always worked and call home, the otherwise empty buildings are used rather than ruined and decayed and she has income for her later years, a business and capital to pass on to the next generation. We have never stayed in AirBnB or other holiday accommodation in Cornwall except for a couple of nights in hotels. We have used such accommodation elsewhere but only where it does not exclude local people such as the National Trust rentals or sole-use parts of homes (as in a self-contained loft conversion) which are continuously lived in by the owners. Dr. SWMBO is descended from farming families around Colan at the back of Newquay; my ancestry is around Marazion and Penzance. Neither of us is Cornish-born (though had my parents not been away visiting my mother's parents at the time I would have been) but both consider ourselves Cornish. It is an attitude, a way of life, a respect for others and for our own ancestors. The term "emmet" means ant (I have never heard "remmit") and equates to "grockle" used farther up-country. It refers to those who creep and crawl across the land as ants do. It is a derogatory term often prefixed by a word my mother never taught me. If you really want to bamboozle them you can use the Cornish language word "moryon" (plural - ants) which can be modified to "moryongoos" for b****y ants. And now back to the story.
  7. We had been casually browsing the market for years before circumstances conspired - or stars aligned - to allow us to buy the cottage. You can pay well over the odds for a Cornish coastal view but we didn’t. We have a view which includes the ocean and the Isles of Scilly. And we aren’t perched on a remote hilltop either. The right property came our way at the right time and the right price. The only down-side being the absence of anywhere to place a model. Thanks to the generosity of Hayle Railway Modellers that issue has been resolved albeit at the cost of a 20-mile drive each way to and from the clubroom. It is good to hear that Penhayle Bay is remembered. Several parts of it were (and hopefully still are) incorporated into other layouts and I still have the big viaduct. Where there’s a will there’s a way. And where there’s a hole in the ground there’s a Cornishman at the bottom of it. We’re a welcoming species on the whole. Just don’t expect a warm reception if you start talking holiday homes / AirBnB lets or the like. The rest of our terrace was very pleased to hear we were moving into an only-home not a second one.
  8. An interesting piece of working on Thursday. The usual 17.03 off Paddington (booked 2x5-car IETs) was, as it usually is, a 9-car IET. Apart from the now-customary confusion about seat reservations there were two added problems. 1. The set in use was unable to provide any heating and 2. Trains are terminating at Liskeard due to Cornish signalling works and a 9-car unit is too long to fit between the starting signal (the limit of operation) and the crossover clearing point in the rear to allow it to shunt back towards Plymouth. Passengers aboard the 17.03, which was keeping good time for once, were advised at Totnes that their train would be terminating at Plymouth “due to a fault”. No mention of any onward arrangements. The preceding train, 16.35 Paddington - Plymouth 1C89 was formed of 2x5-car units. Upon its arrival at Plymouth these were split and the front one assigned the headcode of the 17.03 1C90. The 9-car 1C90 was platformed alongside and Cornish passengers were transferred to the waiting 5-car unit. Which was nicely warm inside As the 17.03 is booked a 9-minute stop at Plymouth to split the units 1C90 left right on time despite being a set-swap and having to detrain and re-train around 200 passengers. Some good work all round there topped off by Dr SWMBO being helped from one train to the other (she always has assistance booked but this was an unscheduled change of trains) and then being seated in the first class carriage down to Liskeard. From where I collected her and drove her home because another three hours on two replacement buses - one to St Austell then another to Penzance - was going to be beyond her.
  9. Where the operation of nominally 125mph trains is severely constrained by the need to path them between 110mph class 387s, 60-75mph heavy freights and the conflicting moves across Southcote Junction and the Reading triangle. Signallers are reluctant to put a freight “inside” in case it takes so long to re-start that it delays something up it’s behind. Cue regular traffic jams. And for every delay approaching Reading there is a lost path up to Paddington often leading to more delays
  10. This matches my experience of Dr SWMBO’s trips Her Monday Up service is a booked 9-car. It typically arrives in Paddington 15-30 minutes late. Her Thursday Down train is booked 10-car to Plymouth and 5-car beyond. It is usually a 9-car set and has typically arrived 20 - 30 minutes late. On the rare occasions it is a 5-car (into Penzance) it is closer to right time. On one occasion it even regained a few minutes on paper from 7 late at Saltash to right-time arrival at Penzance. Examination of the running times suggest that while the set kept to its booked time the minutes were regained from pathing and engineering allowances and a couple of shorter-than-booked station stops. Not time was regained by the set itself.
  11. Passenger levels have returned but the overall pattern differs to pre-Covid. For example the East Coast Main Line, which is almost exclusively an IET-operated railway and has three open-access operators competing for traffic with LNER, is said to be at or above pre-Covid levels with many trains running full. GWR is not at that level yet with something like 80% overall pre-Covid traffic but less than that during weekday peaks and more off-peak. Of note the 12.03 Paddington - Penzance is now regularly overloaded whereas the 10.04 (the “traditional” Cornish Riviera slot) is lightly loaded; the 17.03 is only moderately loaded beyond Reading where it was once standing room only to Exeter. Of other operators SWR claims barely 70% of pre-Covid traffic overall, Waterloo entries / exits (the standard measure of passenger numbers) support this, and whilst most suburban peak-time trains are packed these are now mostly 8-car instead of 10-car and none of the one-time peak extras runs; the “off-peak” timetable applies all day.
  12. Dr SWMBO has travelled weekly since last Autumn between Penzance and Paddington on these wretched things. Of her 36 individual trips to date no fewer than 31 have triggered a Delay Repay claim. Not all of those delays were attributable to the rolling stock but in some cases an adequately-powered train could potentially have regained enough time to have avoided the payout. Some, such as creeping over the Devon banks before being terminated at Plymouth “because we have a faulty engine” clearly have been motive-power related.
  13. Porthgarrow is being tidied up and generally put into good order ready for its outing next month. Recent works include re-surfacing the station platform which brings it up to a better height and covers a few glue blots on the original plus the installation of the second overhead strip light on the “roof”. A boat has appeared in the water and strategically-placed greenery covers a slight gap in the sea wall. I have struggled with the planned fitting of festoon lighting over the beach. It is in place but despite working when tested it refuses to work now it’s fitted. The jury is out on its future. Most importantly the demountable extension board has been fitted allowing completion of the standard-gauge run-off. That means for the first time the sg line is also powered and able to show moving rather than static trains.
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