mike morley

Taken from the High Peak Trail, with Gotham Curve about 150 yards behind my left shoulder.

No need to apologise for harping on. I've never met anything of Ambis's that has been anything less than First Class.

A lot of clear plastics can be very brittle. How does the Wills stuff fare in that respect?

Thanks for the compliment! I know just what you mean about the Wills corrugated iron. I always use Slaters. A few years ago I spilled some solvent on a sheet and it curled and buckled spectacularly and is now perfect for those battered, falling-apart buildings and fences that you often see. One thing I forgot to mention above is that the Wills brick sheets are prone to shattering when being cut.

This gives a better idea of what I meant by meshing. The two joins on the nearer parapet are fairly obvious, but I did a better job on the far parapet, where the six joins are a bit more subtle. These are coarse stone sheets that I laid flat on the Workmate then gave a good seeing-to with the biggest, coarsest file I could find.

This illustrates the point Theakerr made about using drainpipes to hide joins. The limewashed stone sheets were used for the buildings. The loading bank is four feet long in total and uses umpteen inch and a quarter wide strips of the random stone sheets. I made it by getting two whole sheets and finding an area where the arrangement of stones would roughly "mesh" and using that as the starting/joining point for the first two strips. Then you have to find a mesh for the outer ends of the two strips you've just created and so on and so on. It is quite effective (there are four joints in the picture) but It is extremely wasteful and time consuming and you find yourself designing the structure around the sheets, which is entirely the wrong way of going about it. Being so thick makes the Wills sheets quite difficult to work, too, and if you have even a moderate amount to do you soon find yourself taking increasingly frequent and longer breaks to both give your wrists and hands a rest and also to escape the monotony. As you might have guessed, I wouldn't use the Wills sheets again if I could possibly avoid it!

Two blondes walked into a bar . . . You'd have thought one of them would have noticed it..

Viagra and Valium have now been combined into a single tablet. It means that if you don't get a f***, you don't give a f***

Viagra is now available in eye-drop form. It makes you look hard.

I was delivering on the Racecourses estate on Wednesday and the vegetation shredder could be heard hard at work in the vicinity of the Newton Road bridge, so I doubt if it'll be quiet in your vicinity for much longer!

That rare event - a nice day that coincided with a day off - prompted me to get my push-bike out for a cycle ride today. This is what I found. The view from Salden Woods bridge, looking towards Bletchley, showing much evidence of recent clearing. So recent that dimly visible through the lingering mist was . . . The bridge is the one on the lane that runs from Newton Longville village to the Bottledump roundabout. This is the view towards Winslow. If Bungus the Fogeyman happens to see this picture I'm sure he'll be as pleased as I was to see that there is a prototype for our standards of tracklaying! This is from the bridge near Swanbourne Station, looking towards Bletchley again. There is about half a mile of track missing here, but it is not due to the work that's going on at the moment because my 2007 OS Explorer shows the gap in the track already existed then. Cycleroute 51 runs along the other side of the hedgerow on the right. I tried cycling along it in 1990-ish, before Sustrans up-graded the surface, and the mud along this stretch was quite literally knee-deep, with an abandoned Range Rover sunk up to its sump half way along it. The only way I could get through was by taking to the not-long-abandoned railway line, which was almost as soggy, if not as boggy, and I reckon severe sleeper rot prompted the removal of this stretch of track. There was a lot of work going on actually at Swanbourne Station, but the low sun meant I was unable to photograph any of it. There was a low-loader carrying some heavy plant parked on what must once have been the goods yard entrance but which I'm sure the current residents of the station house have long regarded as their drive. Behind the low-loader was a huge mound of bark and timber chippings from where large quantities of vegetation cleared from the line had been put through the shredder. The mound was almost up to gutter height! Beyond the mound were assorted site huts and a couple of hundred yards further down the line was a tantalising glimpse of something that at first I thought was a Mk1 carriage, but I later realised was nothing like long enough - perhaps the length of a six-wheeler? Anyway, I carried on and eventually got to Verney Junction. Rather sad to realise that this is all that's left. Unfortunately, within a minute of taking this picture there was a loud Pop! as my rear inner-tube literally exploded with such force it blew out the side of the tyre! No puncture repair kit in the world would fix something on that scale, at which point I suddenly realised I was nearly 12 miles from home. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've pushed my push-bike a long way today and I think I deserve a pint

Penlan The donkey is indeed from Dart Castings (not knitted!) with a harness made from thin strips of insulating tape. No one makes 4mm scale donkey carts so it's hitched to an etched brass HO farm tip cart from the Shirescenes range that came with the most appalling instructions I've ever met. IKB The wagons are all variations on the 51L kit. I must have close to a dozen now, in umpteen different guises ranging from as-per-instructions dropsides through to fixed-side conversions with GWR axleboxes and buffers. I've got one with early, curved V hangers and brake levers. Another one has got a duplex brake. I did try the Cambrian Models plastic kits when they first came out and thought the bodies were very nicely moulded, but I was not so impressed with the underframes so reverted to the 51L cast kits. 90% of my rolling-stock is metal (Mostly whitemetal with a few etched) and I found that a lightweight plastic wagon in a train-load of heavyweight metal wagons can cause derailments.

I was quite taken with the idea of Fronfraith as a layout location in its own right until I explored the area and realised that Captain's Pitch Bridge and Middle Mill, a quarter of a mile downstream, is much, much better. The bridge is immeasurably more modellogenic, the relationship between railway and river is both complex and interesting and the mill is not only much grander, it's also twice the size so justifies far more traffic. I've got quite a few pictures from my assorted visits but the area is now so overgrown that even at this time of year, when there are no leaves on the trees, it is quite difficult to work out what you are looking at. This is Middle Mill. I took the picture last July, when everything was obviously in full leaf, but it gives you an idea of what I mean. With regard to Pentrefan, it is a through station, but rather than having a fiddle yard at each end it uses the Iain Rice idea of a fiddle yard only at one end with a sector plate serving a hidden return line back to the fiddle yard at the other end. I thought it was a brilliant idea when I first read about it and there is a thread or two on RMweb where I sang its praises from the rooftops, but having lived with it for a year or so, well, shall we just say I shan't be repeating the exercise? The siding at the front of the layout was originally intended to be a mineral line that climbed the valley side to a quarry further downstream. The theory was that the slate shed that is now in front of the sector plate at one end of the layout was originally intended to be at the other end of the layout with the turntable fiddleyard rotating beneath it. The problem was that to get high enough to clear the turntable fiddleyard the line needed to climb at 1-in-33 from the moment it left the sector plate, and when I started the layout I'd only got one loco capable of hauling a train of loaded whitemetal wagons up that kind of gradient. Inevitably, they can all manage it now with such ease that the firemen all lean on the side of their cabs, enjoying a lazy fag and a cuppa! Anyway, as a result, the gradient now starts at 1-in-44 from the sector plate then steepens to 1-in-33. This means it won't clear the turntable fiddleyard so the line now terminates at the end of the scenic boards and is assumed to be a line to an abandoned quarry that remains in use to act as a headshunt serving the exchange siding in front of the slab shed. All that waffle might make more sense if I include a track-plan

Thank you all for your extremely kind words! Pentrefan is my first attempt at an exhibition layout and ignorance lead me to setting such a tight deadline I was working on it until midnight then getting up at 4am to resume work on it nearly every night for three months leading up to its first show! Even so, it still went out first time smelling strongly of fresh paint, with areas of wet glue everywhere and the scenery along the front barely sketched in. I didn't even get to take many pictures during the construction stage and didn't have anything like enough time to set up a thread These pictures were all taken by me at that first show (Milton Keynes, February last year). The three pictures by Mike Brough that I posted above were taken nine months later at Hemel Hempstead. This first one makes an interesting comparison with the middle one of Mike's trio. The last remnant of Fronfraith lingers around the passenger platform, combined with a hint of Mallwyd from the Dinas Mawddwy branch. The mill building from Fronfraith would have been filling the background of this shot, had my original intentions panned out. However, Fronfraith Mill is quite big, does not lend itself too well to being reduced in size and, in any case, is not very modellogenic. Plan B, therefore, was to use a smaller version of the old brewery from Welshpool, combined with one of the bridges from the Talyllyn (Cynfal, I think). The first attempt was of a building about half the size of the original brewery, but it was still too big and overwhelmed that end of the layout Cutting it down to a third of the original size made it better but not good, and by the time I'd reduced it to a quarter not only were the proportions getting upset but it was also starting to look more like the kind of thing you'd find in a Pennine mill-town! Both building and bridge were scrapped and replaced. The bridge that now adorns the layout is based on those found on the Tanat Valley. The brewery building has been replaced with one based on an agricultural prototype from Llanddewi Brefi and moved down the layout to the goods bank. The purpose of this building has always been a bit vague but in the last few days I've decided it will become one of the many outposts of the Old Radnor Trading Company. When I add the signage I'll do something about the buildings distinct list to starboard! This is the only other structure of any consequence on the layout and is entirely generic, being based very loosely on various prototypes found all over mid and north Wales (and one from a Manx lead mine!) It represents a run-down slab mill whose main role now is to hide the sector plate behind it and act as an exchange siding between the quarry locos bringing laden slate trains down the valley and main-line locos bringing empties up the valley. Pentrefan is the smallest and simplest layout I've ever built but that didn't stop it being an extremely steep learning curve. Despite that, it has behaved itself extremely well on both its outings so far. If only I could say the same about my loco stud . . .

This is Pentrefan, which is described in exhibition programmes as "an afterthought on a byway to nowhere". Set somewhere in Mid-Wales at the Grouping, it was originally based on a cross between Aberangell (the only intermediate station of any consequence on the Dinas Mawddwy branch) and Fronfraith Mill in the heart of the Mule gorge on the Kerry branch. As tends to happen, the layout evolved as it was built and the Fronfraith influences have all but disappeared, but I'd like to think it is still recognisably typical of the kind of former-tramway/destitute minor-railway that sheltered beneath the Cambrian umbrella. The pictures were taken by co-operator and photographer extraordinaire Mike Brough. The layout won't be exhibited very often because I have to work Saturdays, but at the moment it's got a provisional booking for ExpoEM and a firm booking for Wycrail, both in 2016.

Why not? You've done the hard bit. Now you've done it once the second side will always be easier. Edited to add; Magnificent work all round!

There is a stretch of no-mans-land about a foot or so long between the end of the scenic section and the start of the sector-plate fiddle yard that I always felt ought to have been made part of the scenic section. Whenever I suggested that to Miss Gusting of Darkest Harborough he always gave me a slightly odd look, shook his head and said "Nah!" in that inimitable way of his. What do you think of the idea?

Seen today on a farm that lacks a name on both its gate and the OS Explorer map. It's up the valley of Llifior Brook, off the A483 roughly halfway between Welshpool and Newtown.

I'd always assumed GWR sheets were only used on GWR wagons, Midland sheets on Midland wagons and so on, but in most of the pictures used as background on the various pages of the link Mickey posted above hardly any of the sheets appear to belong to the same company as the wagon they are on. The clearest example is a Midland sheet on a Great Northern wagon in the background of the Prices page.

I know zilch about LNER wagons, but that looks like a timber wagon to me (mention of a bolster tends to support the idea) and timber wagons on other railways often ran in pairs with brake levers at the outer ends. That would explain the reversed lever.

You could make quite a respectable goods train out of this lot! Found on a cycle ride around North Bucks, halfway between Stewkley and Newton Longville.

I'm a non-member who went to the Expo at Wallingford last year and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I also went to the big Expo at Oxford a couple of years ago and reckon I've never seen so much high-quality modelling under one roof before. I feel 2mmFS stands to loose far more than it might gain in terms of attracting new blood if it either reduces the frequency of its Expo's and/or makes its meets such low-profile affairs that non-members are unlikely to hear of them.

Yes! Forders, not Salters. I'm finding the "Reply quoting this post" facility isn't working for me and hasn't for a few weeks now.

What must have been pretty much the last regular use of the flyover and the line behind that end of Bletchley was turning round north-bound ballast trains from Salters Siding during the final months of the refurb of the WCML. One of the last trains of all was exceptionally long, with one end not too far from the Newton Road bridge and the other end up near the Newfoundout pond and the flyover. All would have been well, had the driver of the 66 in charge not forgotten to close the valve on the brake pipe when he'd uncoupled prior to running round. I was delivering to the houses near the Newton Road bridge when he coupled up to the far end of the train and I realised what had happened immediately when the driver attempted his brake test and I heard the hiss of unrestrained compressed air from close at hand combined with the bellow of a 66 at full revs from some distance away. As all residents of that end of Bletchley can confirm, there are certain circumstances in which the effing and blinding of a pissed-off EWS driver can be louder than the noise being generated by his train . . .

I now deliver on Shenley Church End, the nearest station to which is Loughton Village on the North Bucks Light Railway (AKA Milton Keynes Central on the WCML)