Mike Kippax

Gordon: There was a maze of wires under the Buckingham baseboards; what some were there for, nobody knew! This photo of a small part of the 'maze', taking during the unhappy task of dissembling the railway, may amuse you. I reckon Tony Gee deserves a medal for getting it all running again. I haven't spoken to Tony for ages. Does anyone know whether he eventually restored the AC to working order?

A couple of friends have encouraged me to post this, an extract from my blog stpetrock.blogspot.com. I hope some of you find it interesting. Once upon a long time ago I was privileged to be a regular operator on Peter Denny's famous Buckingham model railway. My station for the best part of 37 years was Grandborough Junction, where one of my important jobs was to communicate with the signal box up the line at Quainton Road... except that there wasn't a Quainton Road on the model! To simulate this station, Peter built an amazing electro-mechanical computer that ran the timetable, c

Just before the line enters St Petrock Station it crosses Tredinnick Creek on two girder bridges. Photos of the bridge over Little Petherick Creek on the Padstow branch were studied carefully. It's a well-photographed spot, especially since it became part of the Camel Trail; here's one of my own photos. Whilst my model wasn't intended to be a copy, I wanted to get the 'feel' of the bridge - especially those metal cylinders that support the structure in mid-stream. I started by building a couple of Dapol girder bridge kits. These were being sold by Airfix when I was a kid (

csvt: The bell is electronic, using a speaker and an edited 'bell' sound that I found on the Internet. I think it was a Tibetan cow bell (!) but it sounds just right. kitpw: Please contact me if you'd like any help in programming the Pi. I taught myself Python using Sams 'Teach Yourself Python Programming', but still needed to search the Internet for answers to other things I needed, such as the graphics and getting the Pi to auto-run on power-up.