Blogiversary

I realised the other day that it is coming up to the anniversary of when I first started this blog.

That was back in April 2010 and I've been keeping it up for 16 years, if you are generous and include the recent period where I was in a bit of a huff and there was something of a pause in posting.

Looking back at some of the first images its remarkable how much progress has been made.

Back then we were still in the early days of building Bron Hebog - hence the title of the blog - and one of the places we'd taken this work-in-progress to was a show at Y Ganolfan in Porthmadog, where we'll be going in a few weeks with Minffordd.

An even earlier outing was to the Warley club show at the NEC in Birmingham, when we were asked to form part of the FR's display, because obviously something as crude an unfinished as this would never normally be seen at what was one of the UK's premier exhibitions.

At the time it seemed like such a gargantuan undertaking to build a layout that bit with so little track bed and so much scenery, and I suppose it was, but we did it, although it was the best part of a decade before it was properly completed, and then Covid happened...

For those who're interested the 2000+ posts on this blog can be browsed as a record of how the project progressed, and there are lots of pictures in the galleries of it at the shows we attended.

Given how long it took to build it's odd how short its time on the exhibition circuit was, but there you go...

Knowing that this was going to be a slow burn was the main motivation for starting the blog.

Aware that it would be many years before we'd be regularly showing our models in a face-to-face pubic forum I figured the next best thing was to put it out their virtually - and as this blog approaches nearly 2 million pageviews (for what that stat is worth) it's fair to say it's certainly achieved that!

Social media has played a big part in spreading the word about our modelling, of course.

Many of you may have clicked to read this page through a link on Facebook,  the site formerly known as Twitter, or the upstart Bluesky.

That one's been a bit of a slow burn, although follower numbers recently hit 300.

If you're on any of those sites and haven't followed us yet just search for Bron Hebog and Minffordd and you'll find us.

The one promotional where we probably should have put more effort in is You Tube.

There are quite a number of videos we've uploaded to our channel over the years, although I've always left it for the models to do the talking rather than put myself in the picture, which is probably one of the things which held it back....

If you've never come across them yet please take a look at the footage, and, as they all say, like and subscribe!

It would be lovely for those figures to look a little less pathetic....