CMRA show 2019

Off to sunny Stevenage for the Chiltern Model Railway Exhibition. A show I still want to call St Albans, even though it moved from their years ago. The venue is much, much better. Loads of space and not bad catering too.

Difficult to pick a highlight from the layouts on show. I think it either has to be the Chinese layout with its long trains and grimy blocks of flats with businesses housed on the ground floors. Either that or the "layout in a suitcase" with a circle of track filled with an endless train of American bogie wagons trundling around.

You wouldn't want to be waiting at this level crossing!

Other than this, there was lots and lots of chat, a bargain from the second-hand stall (more on this another day) and a thoroughly good day out. 

More photos on Flickr. 

Saturday Film Club: Different types of railway

Oh dear.Looking through YouTube, I thought this might be interesting. It is, but not for the right reasons. 

OK, there are some really interesting clips in here, but it's going to have enthusiasts cringing. Especially when we see one of those new fangled diesel trains introduced by the minister...

Point motor fitting for the Hornby Collectors Club magazine

Point motors come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. In the Winter 2019 issue of the Hornby Collectors Club magazine, I tackle fitting them to your track.

Surface mounting motors are a very practical option if you don't want to make holes in your baseboard, or maybe you simply can't because the layout is already built or mounted on a very solid lump of wood precluding access underneath.

Hornby offers a couple of options, the small motor shown above, or a larger solenoid that can be fixed under the board (I cover this as well) or housed in a nice little hut that could be weathered to be very unobtrusive on a OO model. 

Garden Rail February

The trouble with writing magazines is that you can cover a topic and a month later there are new readers who missed out. They then demand you cover that topic again - and all the old hands roll their eyes because they have seen it all before.

However, owning a live steam loco is one of those topics it's important to return to every so often and who better than Tag Gorton to do the honours? With live steam becoming (relatively) cheap, especially compared to small scale models, there will be more and more people newly faced with a loco that cost a good few quid, but that needs care and attention to give it's best.

Since I love building things, it's great to find someone building a substantial fleet on a modest budget and using a variety of interesting methods to do this. Rik Bennet has modified cheap proprietary wagons, scratchbuilt onto readily available chassis and even resin cast bodies from his own masters, and the results look good.

I'm also building things, this time an IP Engineering Colonial Railbus. I've gone town with personalising the model along the way. So much so that the designer told me the article needed an extra page, or fewer photos. As it happens, and an extra page was possible, even then the piece has had to be split into two.

Warehouse Wednesday: Modern crane

Wandering around Kings Cross Waterloo on Monday, I spotted this behind the station and realised it would make a useful prototype for modern modellers. 

As far as I can tell, it's used for lifting and dropping materials down a hole for use on the underground. There is a similar one near(ish) my house for the local water company to do the same sort of job so I assume it's a common design. 

This hole this one operates over is covered with a giant steel grating which is lifted by some hoist things. 

I suspect these are less useful as prototypes, unless you are building a model of Waterloo station anyway!