Mikkel

Aw, sad to see the grasshoppers go. The new ones look very sharp though. Never had a chance to see a laser cutter working. The smell of bunt wood sounds good! Good to see you updating again Pete, just like old days :-)

I understand your fascination with the location, and those substantial retaining walls. You won't need to think much more about adding character and atmosphere, the walls are clearly going to take care of that. Good stuff.

Rich, to be honest yes it does disturb the visual impression for me. The problem is that the levers not only break the illusion, but also confuse the impression because they are still models, but in a different scale. But it does depend on the purpose of the layout, I think. If the aim is educational (eg how a railway is operated) then it would be fine because illusion wouldn't be the main purpose. It's a great lever frame though, very envious :-)

Brilliant again. Tonnes of atmosphere. The matted look of the postcards - and the font - works really well. The church one especially would've fooled me, it has that high contrast and slightly retouch

Hi Pete, good to hear from you and see progress. This is turning into a cosmopolitan layout :-) I look forward to seeing the platform technique you describe with the Scalescenes paper.

Not bored at all. Those etches look superb. I'm still a novice to etched kits but something like this is what I need to gain confidence. I don't care if it's complex but I need to trust that it goes together well. Of course it does help sell a kit when it is built with this kind of skill!

Great to see some stock on Clevedon. This really is one of my favorite layouts on Rmweb :-)

Hi Pete. Sorry to hear about your delivery problems. Could you not upload SWMBOs reply on an audio file? :-) Hope you are enjoying the wagon kits at least.

Those baseboards do look neat. The excitement of starting out a new project is contagious. I'm off to the basement :-)

Fun to see something different on here! It must be interesting work to do your own figures. Did you cast the body parts, I didn't quite understand that? I look forward to the Edwardian ones you mentioned earlier.

Glad to see you've solved this (when the other six are done!). Looks like a very elegant design!

G scale figures ?

It's a pretty entertaining letter though. From now on I shall do my best not to pass unintelligently through place of historic interest.

A phone box would also be good for educational purposes. "Dad, what's the red building?" "That's a telephone box" "Eh?" "Well, basically a house built around a telephone" "Dad?" "Yes?" "The old days were nuts!"

Bit of an optimist, are we? Where's the rain?! :-) Seriously, it does change the feel of this little layout/diorama. A great model now looks evn better. Glad to hear your are over the modeller's block.

The trophy for "most weird layout in the show"? Those holes in the wooden block really have me stumped!

Thanks for sharing these experiments, they're very useful for us all to learn from. One thing that occurred to me: Would the "sparkle" be visible if the viewing distance in your photos was scaled up to the real world? Eg if you look at the last shot, everything is matt (and rightly so, I think) while the coal is conspiciously not. On that basis I'm wondering whether the two wagons on the left are perhaps more "right" than we might at first think? Just a thought, I could well be wrong!

Wait a minute, can't keep up :-) Some real progress there in a very short amount of time, very impressed Ian. Your soldering/foamboard experiment is very interesting, thanks for showing the results which look very good. Good to see trains moving too, must be pleasing for you after the long break.

Quite rare to see that kind of ramshackle, un-colour coordinated and very everyday type of structure on a layout. Which is what makes it look real. Thanks for the inspiration.

Beautiful earthworks. It almost looks edible :-)

Just found this postcard on a site that BG John pointed out. It has previously been captioned as dated 1909 on a Wiltshire local studies website. The wagon colours may of course be fanciful - but I'm posting the link here for future reference. EDIT: A few notes from a discussion abouth this with Miss P and Nick: * The wagons appear to be 2-plankers, and the front one has dumb buffers. They don't seem to be GWR engineering wagons, as these appear dark/black in contemporary photos. * The wagons may not be GWR. They could well be contractor's wagons or - even more likely - Bath stone wagons (common in that area). The dumb buffers also suggest this. This website has photos of stone wagons from neaby Middlehill station that appear to be very similar/identical: http://www.choghole.co.uk/PHOTOGRAPHSOLD.htm (see "Wharfs"). * The colouring of the wagons in the postcard may be false. The colourist may have got it wrong, or the colour rendering from scanning/digitally enhancing the photo may have changed the original shade. However, the colours of the lineside structures appear plausible for the GWR. * If the wagons are GWR and the colour and 1909 date is correct, it suggests that GWR red on wagons could still be seen in 1909. If GWR red ended in 1904, it is not unlikely some would still exist in that colour. Or the colour might even still be painted at that date. See: http://www.gwr.org.uk/liverieswagonred.html The next step would be to examine whether there were red PO stone wagons in the area. But so far it does look more likely that they are stone wagons, not GWR. Thanks to Nick and Miss P for their insights!

The top part looks like my father's house's walls, the bottom part like my neighbours' :-) I'd love to be able to do the top part on some future buildings that are intended to be aged by time, thanks for the inspiration.

Welcome back. I was wondering where you'd gone to. I hope the eyes are better now, sounds like bad luck. Must have affected the cycling too. Very nice brake. I suppose the duckets may be on the low side now that you mention it, but I wonder how many people have ever noticed!

What a neat build. Rivet counters may not be popular, but it's amazing what rivets do for realism.