PeterStiles

or maybe the Charles III Post Office (or C3PO for short)

It would come as no surprise that I'm willing to lay the G scale out again this year. Thanks to a pretty rough year I didn't get the G scale out in the Garden at all so it's been languishing in its boxes all year. I did decide I needed more scenery, and I have failed to find anything suitable for sale. I just want a huge east-European gothic church in G, what's wrong with that? Knowing my skillset I decided I'd be able to tackle a "Tower" for my Vampire to stand on top, lording it over his zombie minions. So. A pack of 5mm A3 foam-card and some glue. I thought I'd bought foam-core so when I opened it and realised it was foam-card and I'd be able to scribe stones on it I was, well, well stoked. Darn 90-degrees out pictures. I blame the parents. Corner-stones were manufactured from Jaffa-cake boxes. Don't judge me... Mrs Vampire joined the party on the roof. Spot the Train Tech wood-effects LEDs in the makeshift brazzier, it runs off a 9v battery hidden in the tower. Well, the roof comes up (which is one reason for the flag-pole) for access to the battery. Stability requires a decent base and a suitable off-cut of wood. Corners all done: Apply Paint. I have some artists acrylics that are suitable. Add some "vines" from Games Workshop; add some "roses" from J. Random Person on Amazon and we're getting there. Apply various grassage to the base. And finally add some glasses for the Vampires to drink some "wine" from... As long as it doesn't rain on Halloween, this should improve the spectacle no end. I suspect I'll have some pictures of this installation in place in a couple of weeks.

Anyrail has updated with a plugin for Hornby tt:120, grab a copy and plan your layouts you your heart's content..

When COVID hit, my wife was given the categorisation of "Highly Vulnerable". This has meant that we have spent the last couple of years inside our house, only visiting Chemist, Doctor and Hospital. The state of affairs worried SWMBO when Autumn came last year and it became apparent that Trick Or Treat was going to go ahead, but that _we_ were still under isolation protocols. So I hatched a plan... Twenty years ago, the Esteemed Elder Brother gave me an LGB Circus Starter Set. I pulled the set from the back of the garage and set it up and watched the train go round the loop a few times. I held the locomotive in my hands and mused on the possibilities. Next up I installed Anyrail and drew some plans up. I compared the parts list to the prices on Gaugemaster. After getting up from the floor I logged onto Ebay and began bidding on as much LGB track as I could find. Let me tell you this; second hand LGB track will work, but it'll most likely need a good scrub. So I sat on the floor with a face mask on, a couple of handfuls of wire-wool and cleaned up the track I'd got, every night for a week. Finally I was able to run a track from the front garden, down the driveway to the pavement, round the Urn-with-a-pot-plant-in at the end and back up again. I built a small platform, bought some cheap "people" and suddenly I had a platform covered in zombies. Not that the ebay-purchased figures were *that* deformed when they arrived, but that I chopped and sliced and scraped and filed until they looked the part. Copious amounts of GW "Blood for the blood god" paint came in handy here. I added some station lamps to the platform, powered by a pair of AA batteries for each lamp. I bagged a couple of PIKO Halloween Hopper wagons going... cheapish, and a LGB Halloween Gang Car Not Very Cheap At All. If the two hoppers are fully laden with sweetage, the Gang Car can only just make it up my driveway back to the house. Poor thing. I'm not sure it was designed for this. I'll keep my eye out in case there's anything more powerful. (Must admit I've my eye on a blue E2ish of some ill repute; although he's not very halloweeny...) My wife busied herself making up parcels of sweets, each small package guaranteed to cause sugar-shock to any child lucky enough to get one. I obtained a Wizard's Robe, and added a Plague Doctor's mask. We added a few more halloweeny decorations around the route and were ready. Halloween arrived. Roving gangs of children would sweep the streets looking for likely candidates to threaten, but I was happily sat in my front garden holding the controller. I would load the wagons up with the parcels my lady wife has put together and run the train down to the driveway. Children could then grab a bag from the train and I could run it back up again. This was, even if I say so myself, very successful. Many Treats were given. The train only derailed once. I didn't get too cold - luckily I was supplied with copius volumage of tea on a regular basis by my sweet lady and the wizards robe was volumuinous enough to wear a jumper on underneath. Although I couldn't keep the plaghe-doctor's mask on for long without feeling light headed. I'm not sure there's a prototype for this layout. I'm sure it'll never win any prizes or be displayed at any exhibitions or as Layout Of The Month, but the enjoyment factor is through the roof. And you never know, today's small child picking sweets from a wagon at the bottom of mf my drive, could be tomorrows TT:120 modeller! (cough)

One of your relatives was a Playboy?

There appear to be some... bugs.. in the shopping cart logic at this time... Sometimes it seems to ignore the discount it plainly shows... You are advised to email Hornby support about it (remember to include the order numbers and stuff like that). They will then promise to fix it... Must check to see if my orders are all fixed now... Yes! they've fixed mine! :(

Yeah, and that's one of the settling points of tt:120, the wealth of European stuff that is usable in a British outline layout. But I wasn't really talking about figures, and I included the Sarissa link to show everyone that there are many useful buildings available, which means the number of UK manufacturers offering support is greater than two.

One thing popped into my head last night.. TT:120 people would be about 15mm tall and 15mm is a well supported scale in wargaming, which means there is a whole lot of manufacturers we've not considered who can offer -stuff- for TT:120 modelling. I'd point to Sarissa as a fine example https://sarissa-precision.com/collections/industrial-15mm.

We had this, on a special 3" single (istr it was a 45rpm) but the Esteemed Elder Brothers Gramophone wouldn't play it. How lucky we felt...

Well, Summer has been and gone and I feel still distinctly draxless.... Any new news?

Huh? Whats this then:

oooh. i'm having one these at these prices:

Isn't it wonderful, I've ordered one already...

Quick Update. Re-ran the search and what should pop up in first place this time? Obviously I can't tell if this is what "joe public" would get because of Googles habit of trying to customise its searches for the users, so this is possibly biased. OR it because everyone else has been searching for "tt:120 flying scotsman" and its affected the pigeons.

Well, the BBC has started the Flying Scotsman celebrations today. I can see a lot of people saying "you know, I'd like a train set" based solely upon this one prime (breakfast time) news item and popping onto the ol' internet to see what the offerings are.... Let's see what google finds... Google ("shopping" tab) finds: ta-da! First item is the Hornby FS OO train set. (YMMV). Second and third items are just the OO gauge Hornby train in different forms... Nope. scroll down all I want no sign of the TT:120 version... Although... if he blows that whistle one more time I've going to take an axe to the telly... I'm trying to work up here!

Hah; nah. At the beginning of each year, just after the Hornby Catalogue is for sale they are replete with many an item "temporarily unavailable" using pictures from the catalogue and blatantly not released yet..

Farish do an 08 sound fitted. If they can fit DCC sound in that there's hope for everyone!

Me mate had one. In yellow. We called it the "Duck Mobile"...poor thing didn't survive very long in our 20 year old hands...

Yeah. Lack of working-lifts kept me & the missus on the ground floor. We didn't look at the programme therefore were happily ignorant that there were any layouts upstairs, and so didn't feel too bad at missing out at the time...

MY missus was in a wheelchair; we got there for 10 on Saturday and we found it quite easy to get around at that time. People seemed happy to make way for us and we didn't fail to get to the Rail to Watch The Trains Go Round at all the layouts. Although we could have done with a few ramps so that SWMBO could see more than the sides of the majority of layouts. As she was effectively "passenger eye height" on most layouts her main comment was the lack of passengers in the coaches. I'm not sure she counted one.

Look at it like this... Imagine the race is actually run over two days. The first 20 laps on Saturday and the rest on Sunday. That all it really is. Except you get some points if you finish well on Saturday. Or, if you want, imagine that the race was red flagged and restarted on the next day. In any case its certainly not worth losing sleep over one way or another.

Would you think me strange if I was considering Option 3 but using "G" scale?

I've dumped the idea of delayed uncoupling and slapped three magnets in one for each siding. If this were a general purpose layout rather than an inglenook shunting puzzle I'd definitely have to look at alternatives. I like the idea of an "uncoupling wand" tho'.

I decided to change my approach to uncoupling. I had tried to use just one magnet under the track and to attempt to rely upon the "delayed uncoupling" possiblities with the Dapol Eastshunts, but that turned out to ... not work for me. So I ripped that magnet our and installed three, one at the end of each siding. I had to lengthen the "main" siding as I needed more room to be able to actually couple the loco to the five wagons therein. I'm quite pleased, operationally with the change. I was able to perform a Shunting without touching the wagons at any point. I had to poke the locomotive a few times on the deadfrogs. Next decision is how to resolve that. Options: (1) use a loco with a longer wheelbase / more pickups :) (2) completely redo the pointwork with live frog points; which will mean redoing all the trackwork because these are the smallest settrack points :( or (3) live with the odd finger-poke reqiured on the loco...

But if all it said was "Watch the new James bond film* then it would be applicable to anytime in the past 60 odd years....