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.