The hills are alive ...

Pictures being worth a thousand words this should tell you pretty much all you need to know about what I've been up to the last couple of days. What it won't say is how close to disaster the whole thing came. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with backscenes. I prefer to paint them, it gives a more coherent look having all parts of the layout made by the same hands but there's ever present possibility of unintended cock up snookering the whole show. At least the other difficult bits can be assembled as discrete units away from the trainset, only being applied if all is well. Backscenes are a bit too 'do or die' to allow for a happily relaxed approach.

Busy, busy, busy

Sunday; rush of blood to the head or a rare bout of enhanced work ethic and the backscene has had its unsatisfactory shade of blue covered up with two coats of white emulsion that will act as an undercoat for a warm cloudless cobalt blue sky. I have a thing about clouds on backscenes, they rarely convince partly because not everybody is a Constable and  partly because backscenes allow one to see a greater sweep of sky than real life and even with clouds well spaced out the backscene appears to have too many. The thirty foot sweep of sky backing onto Morfa would only exacerbate this problem. I've also completed all the fascia and finished painting it grey. Tidied up the layout a treat. 

A bridge too far

Well, hasn't winter just flown by? If you were to take a peek in my railway room you could be forgiven for thinking that not much had happened. You'd be both right and wrong. Trains still circulate, the scenery remains unstarted let alone unfinished and there's still an amount of 6mm square timber strip and coffee stirrers strewn about the place. However dissatisfaction with the Mk1 'proper' bridge deck set in and a Mk2 has been constructed to take its place. At present I'm part way through assembling all the timber piers from the aforementioned stripwood and stirrers. It's made a long process by having to wait for the PVA glue to dry on one side before I can remove the pier from its jig, flip it over and stick the reverse side together. There's a further wait for this side to dry before I can load up the jig again.

I have also been distracted by the delights of the Darjeeling Steam Tramway.

 Photos of stripwood and coffee stirrers are dull, so have a screen capture of the sort of stuff that keeps me motivated.

It lives!

Huge glee; after many years of poor performance I've  finally got something respectable from my Park Royal dmu. Taking out sideways slop in the wheelsets and adding some to the gear mesh seems to have done the trick. Here's a snap of it trundling round this morning.

Time Machine

Elsewhere on the net I've been rambling on about time passing and the loss of the familiar. It may just be an attack of common or garden nostalgia but I'm drawn to the sweet sadness of the long gone. Here's a terrific video that I've found on youtube. It's a stretch of line that's very familiar to me these days, and one that I have memories of from the period shown. It lacks sound, and I'd love to hear a Sulzer being worked properly hard again, so choose some appropriate music and wallow in the past.

In praise of Airfix

I love the Airfix railway series of kits; there's something elementally right about them that lends realism far beyond their face value. Perhaps it's because they subliminally transport one back to the days of Ladybird books (Tootles the Taxi anyone?), scabby knees and the Corona pop lorry. In the sixties they were as clichéd as a Superquick goods shed, today I reckon they are undervalued gems. At the recent Corris show I got hold of four quids worth of Dapol retro loveliness in the shape of the bungalow kit. it's place on Morfa will be as the toll cottage at the Barmouth end of the bridge. Here's where I've got up to with it.

 

 

 

Lots of nothing

I've been fiddling with the video function of my camera recently. The results haven't been very good but they do show better than stills what Morfa is about, and that's space. Most layouts that we see make busy places, where there's much railway interest, their focus. Morfa is really about the landscape and a single line winding through it.