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.

The bodge is dead, long live the bodge

In the previous entry I mentioned the supposedly temporary bridge; well it lasted for five months or so. It was three carefully matched piles of magazines that the flexitrack sat on top of. Though a joyously quick fix that allowed trains to whiz round, it really looked a mess and so with an hour to spare, a big cardboard box and a glue gun I knocked up a better temporary structure one evening last week. Here it is.

Building Bridges

This last week, after months of pondering the problem, I plucked up the necessary amount of courage and took the first step to rid Morfa of the temporary lash up that allows me to run trains round and round in circles. It's taken this time to work out how I'll construct the Cambrian style trestle bridge on a curve that will be the stand in for the real Barmouth bridge. I've had the materials to hand for a while, the easy bit as drawings and articles specify the timber sections  required; arranging them on a curve and to be sufficiently robust has been the challenge. To date I've printed out a template to construct the decking on followed by cutting the transverse timbers to size and staining them to a suitable shade of grey.

Photos of paper templates, chipboard and cut down coffee stirrers aren't that exciting, so by way of compensation here's a totally unrelated pic of the Pwllheli - York  mail train heading into Morfa.