Point building in Hornby Magazine

A bit earlier than normal, the March Hornby magazine arrives through the letter box and inside is the first piece of track destined for the Layout in a Box - a point made from an SMP kit.

Trackbuilding isn't an obvious subject to cover in a general magazine but it is an excellent way to practise your soldering. Anyway, this is only a recent phenomenon, in the 50's and 60's you'd struggle to open a model railway mag without reference to people hammering thousands of track spikes into fibre sleepers to lay track. Either that or Bonds chairs fixed down with some glue made from boiled up horse. Nowadays people stick to Peco...

Also in the mag is a revamped "Staff Projects" section with a bit less Bay Street and a bit more me and Evan Green-Hughes to provide variety.

Best of all though, is the feature on Clarendon, our club P4 layout. This recently appeared in MRJ and looked terrible. The photos appeared to have been printed using an inkjet with one of the colour running out. Despite this they'd been sitting on the shelf for at least 2 years until pressure by the owner got them in print. The current ones have been turned around in months and look magnificent.

The MRJ delay was particularly galling. While I am a member of the club who built the model, I'm not involved in any way with it's construction. Despite this I think this is one of the best model railways anywhere. Certainly I bet it's in the ten best in the UK. Yet the finescale bible didn't seem to be interested.