PeterStiles

However they do sell direct to SME / I&C customers through what was "Haven" power, but it's s now branded Drax.

"One two three four!" "Change hands," "Five six seven eight!" "Change hands," "All you need's the rhythm and the wrist control," "And you can do the......" Some things just stick in your mind.

Just when we'd all got round to deleting the bookmark...

I remember 'O' level Computer Studies. One boy copied another boy's Project verbatim including a (c) notice the original author included... This is on that level of stupidity.

I'm going to horrify everyone and slap the word "southern" on the tank-side in "sunshine" and the pick a random number to go on the side of the cab...

I hate you(*). I'm going to have to lay out my o gauge track now... (*) well, not really (**) (**) maybe i should blame Rails (***) (***) or maybe my lack of impulse control

I blame George Harrison.

Oh well. One (I) is a Subject, one (Me) is an Object, if only we taught the language with a little rigor one would never make a mistake. I also mourn the lack of "whom" in modern usage... At least Microsoft Word Style Checker has reintroduced the use of the semi-colon. Me, I never confuse the two.

Yeah, but you've got to face it, it's a *very* common name..

As *we* well know, it's not where it's made, it's the level of QA that matters..

That's why you Mine, refine and build things, it adds value to the economy. Any why you have Foreign Countries you can export to and import from... But in a closed economy you're just Moving Money Around... At least I've Started to read Adam Smith..

So how come those people building TT:3 exhibition layouts in the late 1950s managed with even less? They may not have had static-grass and 300 colours of paint available and 3d printers, but they made model railways.

Just reading the 1979 Railway Modellers; one Railway Of The Month had unballasted track, and used the Hornby Goods Shed (currently selling as R8002). I'm pretty sure they thought it was a model railway.

Hornby's website includes a section entitled "Last chance to buy" with an additional "Get them now before they're gone for good" Fine. But one of the items is the venerable Hornby (under-board) point motor. I mean I can see the Elite is one of the products in this section, we know Hornby are betting heavily on HM7000 so it makes sense to chill out and stop making Elites, but I've not seen a replacement Point Motor in any Announcement recently. I suppose they could be defaulting to the idea that their target market doesn't cut holes in boards and would only use the Surface-Mounted motor? Both the Elite and the Point Motor are in the 2024 catalogue. Maybe I'm reading too much into a Marketing slogan...

Really... Remind me to check the definition of moaning in the dictionary. There's moaning, accept it. Also accept that no one on Rmweb is likely to buy one of these 8Fs now, but also that's unlikely to affect Hornby's profits this quarter.

Ta very much, that sounds sensible. When I'm brave enough to add the ballast we'll see how my approach goes. I've not yet done *anything* on the side of the points with the manual slider switch...

I found a nice building on the bay-of-e that was eminently suitable for the Rectory for the church. There's one problem, its only got one door, and if you orient the building in what I believe to be The Correct Way Round, then the door opens on the side of the building opposite the church, meaning that the poor Vicar will have to walk round his house every time he Goes To Work. I had a quick check; as we know the platforms on the layout are aligned north-south, and the altar in a Church is supposed to be on the East side (so you face the rising sun as you pray), could I actually move the church round, but nope, the church's position is fixed, its the correct way around (and so we know that the rear of the layout is "East"!). So I was left with only one option, to add a door to the rectory. Luckily I have spare doors. I've got spare everythings. The rectory was also clearly chimney-less, so a cocktail stick was employed. The slice to make the door-fit isn't visible once its painted. Trust me. Fence posts for the porch-sides, spare bit of something for the roof, piece of paper for the capping. Application of some paint to the door and porch. I also painted the timber-framing black to match that of the church closer. I painted the front-door to match :) In position (although with only a few trees for effect; we'll actually have a fairly large wooded area Around The Rectory/Behind The Church

I've been umming and arring about what to put in the final corner. We've got a road in the front left, a field of sheep in the front right, a stables in the rear-right (although not actually fixed down yet) but the fourth corner has been eluding me. Then I saw the Metcalfe Castle Tower and I understood immediately what I needed, a Folly. Yes, I know, I've broken my Metcalfe Rule again. Luckily I'll let myself off. A chunk of expanded poly for a base, glue that on and spread some Foam Putty over it (finally using Foam Putty for its advertised use!) Brown ground; grass and some fencing. I need three more things 1) the sign saying "Lora's Folly"; just need a small piece of suitable thickness sheeting and a cocktail stick 2) the path needs to be gravelled 3) a figure - a man in a peaked cap called Arthur Roberts, known to his mates as six-pence, who will be there to collect entrance fees from the steady stream of punters. It may even benefit from Person With Small Child. I'll keep an eye out. I'm avoiding placing figures on the layout, although I've got a number of boxes sitting on the table here. I'd like to get the majority of the scenery done before I start placing people, I think I can make them look more natural if they are added after the scenery :) > These pictures are all uploaded from my laptop. I promise its not some "mobile phone" thing that's turning them through 90 degrees. Consider it good exercise for your neck muscles. Additional picture, with Arthur and sign:

Now, there are a million things I love about Kato Unitrack, search my other postings on these forums and you'll see how much I stick up for it. However there is a problem with the six-foot. You just can't leave it alone. I tried a thin layer of ballast. Nope. What I have decided on is to bring more use of my friendly Foam Paste. Then painted "Adminstratum Grey" The final job will be to spread a thin layer of ballast over the top of that. I've bought a bag of Official Kato-Mix ballast, so it should colour match the plastic bases. I'm just too scared to try this. I also have to clear all the trains away whilst I do it and with a full roster of School's class that can take quite a while! Like all Ballasting it can wait...

For some reason fifteen years have been taken off the layout and a couple of SECR locomotives have been running round: The C Class was a fortuitous eBay purchase; the terrier was actually bought as new. I've picked up a couple of sets of Wellington Brown birdcages when the sales let them go really cheap. At this scale, If I can't see the running numbers I don't need to renumber them. Should any of the Little People's Accountants on the railway complain that there are two sets of identically-named stock running around, I'll take some tablets and have a lie-down. I recently failed when bidding for another of these C Class; probably a good thing because I'd have had to renumber it as I couldn't get away with two locos with the same number.

From the small collection of signal boxes, I've decided to use the Peco one. All it needs is some paint, and it'll look the part: It looks much better at a reasonably viewing-distance, and when I print the name off I'll tidy up the name-plate. Yeah, I'm quite happy with this. I used Rye Signal Box as a reference for the colours. I'll put a nice garden round the back, those Busche flowers coming into play again. What I've never been happy about are the Japanese buffer-stops you get with the Kato turntable. They look really incongruous on a british railway. So I jumped when some poor fool sold me a pack of ten peco sleeper-built stops. I know that rail-built stops would be more southern, but no one was selling ten of them cheap, I spent a pleasant evening painting the buffer stops up, and deciding upon the red-line-surrounded-by-white for the buffer after a bit of spare googling. I then cut some small pieces of track I had into 5mm bits and glued them into the holes in the rear of the bufferstops, so they look like they're actually built on the rails rather than hanging off the end. I do need to check clearance for the A4 and the Coronation I've got to make sure they can get past the buffer stops near the turntables; no biggie if I need to pull them up and move them back a bit. Additional picture, label applied. Give or take...

My back has been playing up more and more and so I decided that I'd be best off trying to find a way to avoid getting down on the ground to plug the power cabling in. I drilled some holes in the rear-side of the baseboard when it was up against the bookcases one weekend, and then I spent a week looking on the internet for "extension" cables with plugs that would fit Kato Power and Turntable controllers. Grr. Arg. Eventually found suitable cables and, with the help of a straightened-out coat hanger, fished them through the layout so that they poked out the back. Of course the cables are actually 3m long, so I've got coils of cable rolled around inside the base. I'll be able to resolve that - I've purchased suitable chocolate-blocks, wire cutters and even a set of wire-strippers; so when I get a spare pair of hands, I'll tackle that job. I may even solder the cut cable together and just use the chocolate-blocks as insulation. Working on the rear its time to deal with the road. Again a strip of plasticard along the edge and then I laid the road using "Flex Paste" which turns the wood-grain of the plywood into a smooth road-like surface. I explicitly bought a 4cm scraper, which seems a suitable width for an n-scale roadway, to do the scraping with. I'll be edging one side with Metcalfe paving. Yes, again, I know what I said, but the paving doesn't look out of scale :) The road goes all along the back from the gasworks to the level crossing. and then round the church, school and down to the oasthouse too. The tarmac will peter out at the Oast House end and turn into gravel and dirt. And Yes I'm wishing I didn't have a curve around the church. It'll be fine.. A small copse of trees has arrived between the oast house and the crossing-keeper's cottage. I've been on a Tree-Buying spree on eBay and I'm going to have a LOT of trees, especially behind the church. One thing you'll note is that all these buildings have had their roofs painted the same colour. We know that the church and school and oast house will pre-date the coming of the railway and so they would have been built from local materials where ever possible, and having roofs that look the same colour goes a long way to making the buildings look as if they fit in nicely.

One of the things I built for our coffee-table layouts was a church and surroundings ("built" is stretching it really as its another Liddle-End building) I feel this will look really good on the layout. I've got a crossing-keepers house (which is, of course, completely the wrong orientation for the position its going to be sited on, an Oast house (so that puts the layout in Kent) and a Scenecraft school. Yes, that's the Metcalfe stables buildings in the far-corner. I know what I wrote, but I think I can get away with these as they are reasonably small... I'll see. You can see some Noch "boys playing football" figures which will go great in the playground area behind the school. Lora would be asking me "what about the girls?", so I'm on the lookout for some Young Ladies models that would be suitable; just don't go googling for them - you end up with all sorts of unsuitable websites being offered. I'm avoiding a residential area and I'm also avoiding an industrial area; If this was residential then you'd expect better access to the station than "drive off in opposite direction to station and then circle round 1/4 of a mile to the front of the layout". If this was industrial then I couldn't get away without a goods yard and a more more sidings, which would have used up all the space and there wouldn't have been any space to *put* the buildings in the first place. So I've gone for three buildings which could easily be on the edge of a village/town rather than in the centre, which suits a lot of Southern stations which ended up a mile's walk from the place they were named after.

Woodland Scenics Foam Putty is a wonderful material. It fills. It's light. It's finger-friendly. It paints up nicely. So I've built up the area around the turntable with some foamcard and the foam-putty. And various brown paints. The fencing around the side seems a sensible H&S approach, and I just had a pack of the white flexible fencing around that I'd seen going cheaply on ebay. I'll eventually apply various floor-covering materials, i've a brown "flock" that I quite like to use for the 'rough ground' effect it has, and a variety of static grasses and Busche flowers, so don't expect the ground to look like this forever. The layout has a pair of Kato re-railer/crossing sections at the rear-right. These were added as a practical nature to help get the track the Correct distance apart; at the other end of the back is the scissors cross-over which does the job on that side. I grabbed some Peco crossing-gates and with some judicious application of more Foam Putty I arranged the gates in a nearly-sensible position. As you can see the concrete fencing has run along the rear of the layout. I've decided against retaining walls or half-relief houses (which I should have decided upon BEFORE buying sufficient Metcalfe kits) and I'll just run a road down here to the Gasworks, and forward from the level crossing towards the other buildings. I'm not worried about having too many Metcalfe kits; I love building them; but they really are a little large when compared to the resin building ranges; and as I've committed to the Liddle End gasworks (and church and crossing-keepers house) I didn't want to overpower them and surround them by the Metcalfe housing. I like the way you can age many railway layouts by the buildings on it. The 1960s and 1970s were clearly the Age Of Airfix, and you must wonder at the sheer number of railway buildings they must have sold at that time; almost every layout that wasn't completely scratch-built had one or more Airfix kits; I find them very nostalgic and have a number on our Lockdown Layout. Then you get the 2000s and suddenly we're in the Age Of Metcalf; the same thing - it seems that Most layouts have one or more of their structures on. Again, I don't mind them, I love building them as they are clearly the pinnacle of cardboard modelling; however being pre-coloured you do get, I feel, a bit too much conformity that you didn't get "back in the old days".

Time to get the passengers some protection from the elements. I'd accidentally bought a Ratio Apex Canopy kit so I put it together and realised it was perfect for my skinny platform as it is held up on centre-posts. I drilled small holes in the end of the posts Introduced them to small pieces of wire (cut from paperclips) and then drilled matching holes into the platforms and applied UHU, then stand clear and don't wobble them for a few hours. Now then, I know that many people would have put the skylights all along one side, however this obviously means that the platform runs north-south so that, thanks to our latitude, we don't have a prevailing direction the sun hits the station except South! There is a reason for everything. A nice man on eBay printed off the platform signs for me. Well, he wasn't that nice as he did make me pay for them. Just to show that the layout doesn't spend all its time in the lounge. The sheep-end of it has 5mm of black neoprene glued to it and so the layout can stand up on end against the bookshelves in the conservatory. Ignore the other baseboard next to it; that's the TT120 layout I started, but I built it too ruggedly and so I can't pick it up anymore :( I'll be taking that apart at some stage and re-building it - but that's another project...