Ben B

The view from the Foreman's office... it's a warm night at Spon Lane in 1979, as the night shift take a tea break. Unnoticed by the men, a fox darts along the towpath beneath. (I've dug out some unused pics from the diorama as I start on a proper micro layout of all this)

Sorry for the confusion caused- I gather it's something close to gauge 2, yes. A fellow modeller in the US says he heard from a Lionel rep it was a commercial descision to keep the Ready to Play range exclusive and incompatible with other manufacturers. Some of the trains can be re-gauged, it varies from the relatively easy (the diesel), to the tricky (Hogwarts), to the nightmarish (Polar Express). Lionel must have cottoned on, as more recent trains are glued together, not screwed, so no chance of re-gauging without massive effort. Where it gets confusing, is Lionel used to make a lot of this to actual 45mm gauge. I do wonder if Hornby thought they were getting the G trains, rather than isolated, incompatible sets. It's a shame, the point of the project was to explore Hornby using this toy range as a sneaky back-door to the garden railway market, especially as firms like Playmobil have given up on it.

Head-on at Betws-Y-Coed a few weeks ago :)

Going large; hopefully this counts, it's still in the spirit of the topic :) I've done a project which has ended up in "The Collector" for Hornby, looking at a 'what-if' revival of the Triang Big Big name. The idea is that Hornby made a wider range based off those Lionel "Hogwarts Express" sets they imported a few years ago, so I extrapolated from what was in the Lionel RTP range already. Wanting a tank loco, I thought I'd do some repaints of the Thomas set (what with Hornby not having the Thomas license any more). Repaints underway, with the faces removed. I didn't want to do too much modification, figuring that in the early days of this hypothetical range, Hornby wouldn't want to tool new toys for the junior market, but just commission repaints for the UK. The inspiration was this toy, a re-liveried Thomas push-along. In hindsight I wish I'd shortened the smokebox, but I was re-using the Lionel components and design, including the plug-in baseplate which held the face. The new smokebox was a bit of a cobbled-together job (being near the end of the project) using a rubber and plastic furniture castor, plastic sprue, and some bits from medical cannulas (unused scrap stock at the day job). Bright yellow version for a more 'toy' set, following the "Polly"/"Nellie"/"Connie" tradition :) There's a very, very vaguely-outlined plan for a layout if a house move comes off, or maybe re-gauging from Lionel's stupid wide gauge down to 45mm...

Love the 21" micro layout, so really looking forward to seeing this develop :)

True, but I was thinking that the Welsh Government have already formally admitted they'll abandon Fairborne when the time comes, so will the Cambrian Coast line through the village be diverted or defended? Of course if by then they've gone through with the plan to restore Bangor-Afonwen, which gets talked about periodically, then that'll be an option to keep the coastal towns served even if Fairborne goes under.

Love the bright yellow van, but the modeller should probably have weathered it before popping it on the layout :)

According to google translate, it's "how how!" and Corsican. Guessing it's some kind of witty tag for the 'artist' but damned if I know the context... still, lucky he didn't get zapped writing that high up on the nose of an electric unit...

I mentioned the other day about my BR red American tank loco. Finally found the box it was hiding in! Still not sure on manufacturer. And it's untested... but it's staying as it is, part of the collection. I have a spare body in plain black, as I fancy a very unlikely yellow/black chevron-liveried example for my Spon Lane layout, an industrial internal-user line in a 1970's West Mids engineering works. Why they'd even have a US switcher... is a problem for Future Ben to work out ;)

I'd been thinking something like a 101 for the views and big windows, as well as a heritage atmosphere which might attract some extra punters. To be honest, what the Conwy line actually, probably, needs are just more trains a day, as does the Coast. That would need Transport for (South) Wales to get their affairs in order though, and appreciate what exists north of the Heads of the Valley road. Given I read yesterday they are actually cutting some Cambrian Coast services, retiming others, and punting the summer-only hourly Shrews-Aber trains to 2026, it seems unlikely...

Yesterday was, apparently, Gerry Anderson Day 2024. As a massive fan, I wanted to do something, a build, a project, some photographs. My original plan had been to build a trio of Airfix Angel Interceptors which I picked up from Pennine Models over a decade ago, to accompany my Imai Cloudbase toy/kit I showed on here last year... but somewhere in the intervening years since purchase and starting them, I'd lost the canopies for the Angels. In the end, some eBay purchasing turned up a pair of Imai Angels; one smaller and a bit more toy-like, one larger and a little better quality (there was also an Imai SPV which was pretty horrendous to build and finish). Airfix Angels go for frankly stupid money at the moment. The Cloudbase; very toy-like in places, really nice in others, but quite enjoyable to build. I did a simple paint-job with some weathering, but the transfers were too old and dried-out to use, they fell to bits trying to apply them. I also lost one of the Angels which pinged off who knows where when testing the insanely-powerful catapult. I hasten to point out that the model-making isn't up to the standards seen elsewhere in this thread, I was more bothered about creating something to have a play with for photography purposes. My intention was to shoot outdoors, doing long-exposure pics whilst on holiday in Wales, and there was a good chance these models would get damaged shooting outdoors. The Angels had a waft of primer, then sprayed white, a minimum of detail painting and some weathering with Citadel 'Nuln Oil', then finally some rather poor transfers owing to the age of these kits. To capture the Angels in flight, I'd built a rig using a hand-held tripod, camera baseplate, two telescopic aerials, and a load of duct-tape. I wanted to do as much as possible in-camera, rather than messing with Photoshop, and had all sorts of ideas of sunsets, mountain backdrops, lakes... and then Storm Kathleen happened. Bang went the location shoot, and then the following week of work left no time for a re-shoot back in Yorkshire, so come the Saturday, I improvised these pics. Two boards with sky backdrops (that I usually use for miniatures shoots, created a few years ago for the Port Eden layout), a load of cotton wool, and a small camera tripod under Cloudbase. The shadows under the clouds are a bit annoying, though from certain angles could be being cast onto an ocean far below, and it was a bit of an improv at the last minute, but it was a fun little project to do. I deliberately used a slight fisheye effect to help make the pics a bit more dynamic, and the graininess and noise hopefully makes it look a little like 1960's film. In any case, it was a nice change from railway modelling for a bit :)

Maybe reviving and mainline-certifying a 101 would be the way to go. Maybe a two-train set for 6 cars, or even just three/four cars with a small buffet as a tourist train option. If Swanage can make one work on the mainline network, maybe TfW could as well. No need to worry about run-rounds or such, and if part of the TfW fleet it could always once a week run on to service at Holyhead. All wishful thinking though. Easier to coast along doing what they do now, and continue with the minimum...

The Conwy Valley feels like a criminally missed opportunity, and one NR have a contradictory attitude to. They spend a fortune on flood defences, but block upgrades to points to allow slate waste trains. TfW run a very sparse service which they'll frequently cancel to redistribute stock, but assign modern DMU's, far newer than those used on 'premier' services which often have 153's covering longer diagrams. I remember in the 1990's where the Conwy was home to the specially-repainted 101 set "Daisy". It feels ripe for a more tourist/heritage foccused service alongside the regular passenger diagram, the branch surely has capacity... maybe something like they did on a branch line in Brittany I visited about 15 years back, where SNCF had a railcar which ran the branch, and a heritage group ran a tank loco on tourist stock twice a day in the summer. Though I doubt the will, budget, insurance or organisation would be there for it here...

If I can get up there before the bats arrive back. Most spring/summer periods we end up with bats in the proverbial belfry, which I don't mind much... until I come to do some model making and realise the thing I need is stuck in a box in Dracula country ;)

0-4-2 with new splashers, for my money. I think it looks like it has potential! Is it one of the plastic Thomas toys, a magazine partwork issue one? I had a Boco and Daisy which were part-converted for 009 way back, might still have them up in the loft somewhere...