Jongudmund

I've thought the same. Would it be a railway within a city block or between blocks?

I think the Johnster has a point. There are no cheap hobbies if you're going to do it properly.

The new passenger train is on Black Friday madness at Argos - down to £67.99 so almost half price. Also on special at Smyths Toys and John Lewis. I have engineered a Christmas present or two :-)

Hey congrats on appearing in Garden Rail! I got a free copy with BRM and you were the cover star.

Oh wow. I didn't know they were moving. Must pop in there.

Hey, more Lego train fans. Great. I've succumbed and bought theme new express train on a Black Friday deal so I'm going to try out Powered Up. I have a spare PF kit if I don't like it. The official Lego Store employee line is that IR was old fashioned and so Powered Up is an improvement. We will see. I will resurrect my blog to review it. (And maybe write some other stuff on there too. I'm way behind on it.) I'm surprised 9v only went out in 2006. I have a set from 1999 that's 9v and I have accumulated some tracks since and a spare power unit. I want to integrate a 9v loop into my set up if I can ever set it all up. There have been Lego booster track packs since 2010 but I agree the lack of straights is annoying. I haven't tried any of the third party larger radii curves or S brick components as I've always been a Lego purist. But I've heard good things about them.

Home Bargains have some 1:43 Fiat cars. All new types, ideal for modern image 0. Only 1.99 each. They're in Fiat packaging so I think they must be promo models being sold off cheaply. There were a couple of different ones in my local HB. (What I find with HB is that they will often have 1 or 2 of a toy range in a given store so it's worth visiting more than one store if you can. We have 4 in Cardiff and I've been known to trog round all of them to complete a set of something.)

Imo the train manufacturers should have been looking at battery locos (recharged through micro USB like a phone) and controlled off a phone or tablet a long time ago.

The Lego trains being advertised are new out this year. They have a completely new control system called Powered Up which can run off a phone app, replacing the infra-red system they had used for the last 10-15 years. All the trains are battery operated and you can get rechargeable batteries if you want. (They gave up on powered track at the turn of the century) Of course it's still all retro compatible. They will eventually sell the new Powered Up elements so people can swap out the infra-red stuff. But the rolling stock and such will work. I quite like the new passenger train. It comes with one engine so two sets will make a decent length double ended train (and give me a spare Powered Up system to swap into another train if I want). The freight train is less inspiring. I'm not keen on the wagons and the engine is too European for my liking.

Ground naturally undulates so I wouldn't worry about it. Cover it with bushes and stuff and no one will notice.

That river is one of the best I've seen. It looks like real water.

That is a very good point that Nearholmer makes. The absorption in model making is great for relaxing and reducing stress. Until you mess it up or drop a bit or something won't fit or something. But even then, at least you're aggravated by something you can potentially fix.

I belong to a Lego Facebook group and people often show off their 'modulars'. These are a series of buildings Lego have produced to a very high standard, lots of details, really clever building techniques and so on. They retail at over £100 each, many are nearer £200. So a shelf with 10 on... easily a couple of grand's worth of Lego, particularly of there are older models that the owner has bought second hand (they tend to appreciate in value). Lego can be a cheap hobby. But it can also cost a lot more than model railways.

Just another comment on photos and captions. Page 84 (Thakeham Tiles), the top photo is of the model but the caption is about the prototype (I think) I don't really care about track plans but it is helpful to have some distance shots of most of the layout so we can see how it all hangs together. A few of the articles (Tgb Metals, Thakeham, Scratchy Bottom) are just a succession of close up photos. This means some of the things mentioned in the article aren't pictured.

Looking at the print edition I really like the Scratchy Bottom article. But the same photo has been printed twice with different captions.

A few thoughts on this Lego and Games Workshop have been mentioned. There's a Lego train group on Facebook and the quality of work in there is sometimes breathtaking. Building a tilting train out of Lego isn't easy but it's been done. There's a chap building a railgun. Similarly the modelling detail by skilled Warhammer 40,000 painters would put many railway modellers to shame. There is modelling going on, just not the traditional railway modelling. The demographics may be skewing older because the population is. If we are asking 'where are the young people in our hobby', well, where are the young people generally? Our society is getting older. It's not as extreme as Japan yet because the UK has benefitted from young people emigrating here. Thirdly, the 'millennials' and young adults are often subject to insecure employment and housing. Many live in one rented room in a shared house, or still live at home. They don't have the space for a model railway even if they would like one. Fourth, model railways are very old tech. Even DCC is a weird development of DC with the power coming through the track and needing to manually programme trains. As someone mentioned upthread, where are the chargeable radio control trains? (Apart from in Lego boxes) Fifthly, I totally agree with the many comments about politeness and selling the hobby. There are some rude people in every hobby, not much we can do about that. There are also people who will instantly jump on any inconsistencies or slam a model for not being realistic because it's a scale six inches shorter than it should be, etc etc. That can be off putting if you get the wrong side of a know it all who talks to you in a condescending way. It really doesn't take much to put people off starting a time-consuming, expensive hobby!

I think that's beautifully done. Love the snowman by the station. Was that bought in or did you make him?

This is great. I love Discworld and I think you've got New Ankh sorted. Being New Ankh of course it will have a few 'newer' buildings. But they would get grotty quickly.

I clicked through and read your lazy susan thread. Great photos. I like the slight hill in the middle that obscures the track.

It's vertical integration. You can make more of a mark up selling your own stuff in your shop than selling other people's stuff, where they need to make profit too. It's vertical integration. You can make more of a mark up selling your own stuff in your shop than selling other people's stuff, where they need to make profit too.

Given the public health news we need to be using more plastic round the middle of a lot of figures as well.

If the line West of Bridgnorth hadn't been lifted, the Severn Valley would have run through the Ironbridge gorge into Shrewsbury. I'd model that, as if the SVR extended, connecting Kidderminster and Shrewsbury 'today'. A mix of stock. Occasional sidings to park wagons I like the look of. And the house I grew up in on the outskirts of Shrewsbury on the backscene. (Maybe little versions of me and my brother watching the trains with my dad) It would be fairly simple to operate as it would be single track most of the way. Shunting opportunities at the stations.

When I briefly worked in Caerleon a few years ago I couldn't really believe that the railway run through the centre of the town but there wasn't a station. (The road links aren't great, especially from the west. I'd have found it helpful to get a train.) There clearly had been one once because they still had a Station Road. A very brief Google just now and apparently there were plans to reopen the station and work was scheduled to start in 2016 according to a news story in 2016. But the station wasn't in a list of proposed new stations in South Wales published in 2017. I'm hoping someone on here would have a bit more information. Just to satisfy my curiosity, really.

I realise I haven't kept this blog up to date as I have acquired bits and pieces for the railway. Never mind, let's start with my latest acquisition, which all started with the news that Toys R Us has gone bust meaning I was left with a useless Gold Card from the store. Useless, I thought until Smyth's Toys offered any Gold Card holder the chance of 20% off any purchases if they handed in their Gold Card. Off I went to Smyth's Toys. I bought, um, let's just say a few things, and one of them was another set of 65001, the white passenger train. Last time I posted about this I said it was a bit of a disappointing set and yet here I am with a second one. Well, I had my reasons. Firstly, I wanted a power functions set up for my Christmas train and this is one of the cheapest ways to get the motor, battery box and controller. Secondly, as noted in my previous post, the three car train is a bit lightweight, meaning it derailed easily, and it was too short to look satisfyingly like a train. There are enough parts in the box to make two carriages, with about 4 parts substituted and 7 very small bits added from my spares boxes. I was very pleased with that and think that bringing it up to a five carriage train makes it look much better. I set up a test loop on the living room floor and the extra weight of the carriages keeps it firmly on the track. Even though I have professed to having more interest in the freight trains, I am now thinking about building a station. That's my next project, maybe. In the meantime I will dig out some other photos of things I have been working on in the past year. Thanks for reading.