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.

Death of the Exhibition ?

Many years ago if you were a bit of a show off and wanted to let the world know what you'd been up to in your spare time, then there were two options, get into print or take your models to an exhibition. These days there's an easier way, and you're looking at it. However the interweb would be nothing without pictures and the digital camera both compliments the net and expands the ease with which one can get into the model press as well.

My simple, relatively cheap and frankly outmoded compact digital camera allows me to mount both a show and tell campaign here and produce photos of a good enough quality to be accepted for publication in the modelling press. I don't fool myself that my images are as good as those taken by the regular magazine staff photographers but they do allow step by step workbench shots to be undertaken, also living in the sticks many hours from anywhere would make for a long day for the paid snapper. Now to get a usable shot may take many attempts, I'm always in awe of the few shots the professionals take and the high success rate they achieve, but doing it digitally encourages one to keep bashing away till the results please.

 

Very good but what about the exhibition I hear you ask. Well, big layouts and exhibitions are a bit of a pain. Building a big layout so it can be broken down into manageable chunks takes far more time and a bit more money than constructing it in one unmovable piece. With the digital age giving easing the sharing of ones endeavours will we see a tail off layouts being made available for shows? Small layouts though easier to transport still become more complex when built to do so, and then we get into the sheer hard work that attending an exhibition can be. Though it's undoubtedly enjoyable when aggregated out, the frayed tempers, the stress when the toys go 'tech' and the last day's unseemly scrum to get out through the door do make me wonder if some wouldn't prefer to stay at home and just post photos and videos online.

What will the next ten years bring, will we see a decline in the number of exhibitions? Well I think I detect a growing number of big layouts built for home use only. Morfa would be a bugger to build in transportable format, hugely expensive to take on the road and potentially disappointing as many of it's best viewing angles are from inside the operating well.

Scattergun

Morfa will be a long time coming; when one man tries to fill a big space with hand built models it's inevitable. Reading the railway press it would seem that most layouts are tackled in layers, beginning with the baseboards, working one's way through track, wiring, landscape, coming to a conclusion with with buildings and details. I've an idea that when looked at by the time and motion men this would probably be judged  the most efficient/fastest method. Morfa could daunt if tackled this way, and many of the creative choices stifled at an unnecessarily early stage. I've deliberately gone scattergun, bringing to completion many of the small component parts that will go to make up the whole without much care about their chronological necessity. I therefore find myself with half finished 'proper' track, jury rigged wiring, baseboards lacking the front profile sections, yet some completed structures and road vehicles. By breaking the workload down into manageable chunks measurable progress can be greater than the glacial pace of the whole .....

Transit van (detailed and repainted Trackside) and garage (converted Airfix kit)

MGB (repainted and detailed Cararama) and lock up shop (scratchbuilt in plasticard).

.... but I mainly do this because it pleases me.

Playing trains

Morfa is intended to be a long term project. I've always estimated that it will keep me amused and busy building for about twenty years. I suppose that as I started construction three and bit years ago that leaves another seventeen to go. I had thought that the main circuit would take another year or more to finish; hand building track with individual sleepers results in slow progress. However thanks to the efforts of friends who pitched in with staple gun and a box of flexitrack off-cuts and misshapes the circuit was completed two weekends ago. It is of course a temporary fix, and proper track will replace the ugly bodge we created but for now it's huge fun to see trains circling round.

Inspiration, here and now.

Though it's always interesting to work out how one got where one is, it's also good to take a look at the current influences. One thing that I keep going back to watch is this you tube clip of loco hauled summer Saturday trains on the Cambrian main line between Machynlleth and Welshpool.

It's not just the internet that inspires, I'm fortunate to live twenty miles or forty minutes away from Morfa Mawddach so trips to the area are frequently possible. One of my current favourite views of Morfa is from the terminus of the Fairbourne Railway on the sand spit sticking out into the Mawddach estuary.

In the begining.

It's likely that like most things in life our tastes in model railways started to develop at an early age. I know most move on from ready to run trains whizzing round the carpet, though there's still something captivating about tin plate rattling away on scenery free bare boards. I'm also fairly sure that it's not just the obvious that influences what we choose to make models of. Looking just at the real railway or the modelling press can only lead to an incomplete picture, at best a railway centric vision of the real world at worst something disconnected from the other realities of life.

It's hard to tease out the exact starting point that Morfa originates from, but in general terms it's strongly influenced by childhood family holidays to north and mid Wales. That it's a Sulzer stronghold probably owes a lot to watching class 24s splutter away in the sidings at Penmaenmawr as they walloped mineral wagons and hoppers about. Though Penmaenmawr was the most frequented holiday destination the Cardigan bay resorts of Barmouth, Tywyn and Aberystwyth also featured. I carry some half remembered magical memories of  journeys over Talerddig, the ramshackle halts at Abertafol and Dyffryn, the cool of the slate caverns at Pensarn and having the freedom at fourteen of being able to go out on my own with a rail rover and explore all this fascinating and enchanting world.