brylonscamel

.. I wouldn't put it past you to get carried away and reopen the Dornoch light railway!

It appears that summer has arrived on the coast ..

Another pre-TOPS acquisition is this Derby Sulzer - an interloper from the midland region. It was a disastrous early repaint of mine from some years ago. A cheap eBay body was found and she's been fettled back into use with my splosh-it-on and wipe-it-off weathering technique.

Other locos that have recently been added to the 'blue era' collection include this 27 with her tablet-catcher recess and 1970s pre-TOPS number . Here she is, lurking on the servicing road at the Braeside shed ..

I was delighted to find spare doors were available as a spare and they duly arrived the following week. 37001 is now sporting a domino headcode panel at No.1 end. She looks very fine and I'm less inclined to be so cavalier with sophisticated models!

It was possible to remove the panel doors - with anxiety-inducing use of a fine blade. But our 37 was still looking rather awful, so I threw myself on the mercy of Accurscale.

A class 37 arrived recently, adding to our rosta of 'blue-era diesels that remain a fixation of mine (schoolboy spotting/bashing nostalgia) The model has removable panel doors, so you can swap out the headcode blinds. It's all well documented in the instructions and at no point did it suggest the need to glue the doors afterwards. Of course, our resident nitwit-in-chief decided that such a thing was needed and dabbed each door with butanone. The result was ugly ...

Although I'm most at-home with my buildings, I'm happy to fiddle with locomotives and stock, minor alterations, detailing, renumbering and weathering. Sometimes I make a mess of things, usually when I plough on with something before I've checked my method. Thanks to the helpful people at Accurascale, I was able to recover from a recent blunder ...

'Big T' delivered to the Glentanar Hotel

... Grace Jones using a bit of innuendo! Surely not!!

"Pull up to the bumper baby"

Thanks - there is something brewing in those clouds!

More recent photos illustrate the changes

Before-and-after I recently found a photo of 'distillery corner' in 2020, with just basic groundwork and track. It's a surprising transformation!

The sunshine coast!

"Sunset mistaken for a dawn" A long view of the quayside on the harbour at Braeside ..

I imagine they come with a fascinating booklet, about Sir Norbert Grisley, The famous race to KingNarber Junction and other poorly researched facts about the oldy Victoriana steam world.

One too many My trips to see Dad and contribute to the layout are mostly made by train. This limits the amount of stuff I can bring. I weathered the locomotive time but the box was just a bit too big for my rucksack! It'll be good to add it to the growing fleet of 'BR Blue' but on another trip.

The quayside remains a good location for photography ..

Looking far more at home on our steam-era shed is 60532 'Blue Peter' Allocated to Aberdeen Ferryhill in 1951, she moved to Dundee in 1961 for her remaining years in mainline traffic.

I sense an awkward conversation stage left. The steam-era crews are resisting any requests to ditch their shovels in favour of a power handle.

Here are images taken around the engine shed that feature BR Blue locomotives, including a pre-production sample of the marvellous SLW rendition of a boiler-fitted 25/3 I was allowed to weather the loco to aid the realism of photography.

Trip Hazards and F Settings .. My latest trip south was a bit of a mercy mission to help Dad after a sudden trip to A&E. Whilst the poor chap was recovering, I stopped working to cover domestic chores. I also amused myself with dog walks and layout photography. The DSLR camera was in the 'overnight bag' so I used the opportunity improve my photography. I'd been looking at image data on recent photos to work out why the images were often grainy and needed work in Photoshop to spruce them up. The lighting is OK for human eyes but not so brilliantly for photography. I haven't got access to specialist lighting equipment, so I hit on the idea of using the tripod to steady the camera. This allow for longer exposure and finer ISO settings. I've also been playing with focus-stacking software to blend my manual focus images.

Backstreet Boys ..