Primed Princess

New images have emerged from within Himself’s isolated bunker of progress on our unpowered Princess.

He’s added some extra details to the kit, such as the vac pipe at the front and extended the nameplate block.

I’ve decided to go totally out of period and gone with heart over head on the finished livery.

We’ll turn it out in peak-Garraway era condition green with frames highlighted in red and white tyre walls.

That’s the condition it was in on the plinth at Stesion Fein and then in the goods museum at Harbour Station where I first remember seeing it.

Does anyone have a photo, or the rights to a photo, I could share?

There are lots on the internet but I try not to do copyright theft.

Alco Overhaul

Our Mountaineer has been ailing for some time - although at least, unlike the real one, it was still in service.

Its progress was very erratic, both in starting and when on the run, until finally it expired in a cloud of smelly smoke.

The problem clearly lay with the motor, but Himself was reluctant to break up the spare Arnold chassis we have in stock for a motor transplant.

Instead he was even more ambitious and found a way to extract the the commutator from another, even older, chassis and install it into the motor housing of the one under our operational Alco.

We gave it a test at the weekend and it performs very well now.

It does still irk me that it's the only locomotive we have left in our fleet with an inaccurate chassis, and I retain an ambition to get him to have a go at fitting a Farish O8 chassis into a spare body kit I obtained for just this purpose.

The trouble is there's always something else in the build queue ahead of it.

I suppose at least that's prototypical......

In The Beginning

While I was searching through Himself's collection of slides a few days ago, looking for pictures of Earl of Merioneth, I came across some images that I forgot we took of the early stages of construction of Dduallt.

At a guess I would date these pictures as 1992, so pretty much a quarter of a century ago.

As you can see, by this stage he had finished creating the trackbed, which was a very precise operation with the gradient on the spiral, and the track had be wired up and was being tested.

The rolling stock is worthy of note.

This was in the early days of my scratch building carriages in styrene so some of the trains are formed of very weighty white metal GEM kits and the brass Langley bowsiders.

It was also the era before the Backwoods Miniatures kits came along and so our Fairlies tottered along with tiny wheels from an adapted Bachmann diesel chassis sitting beneath a white metal Langley body kit.

The model of the Earl was a fine kit-bashing effort by Himself with the tanks formed from styrene and the smokeboxes and chimneys sourced from Parkside Dundas kits for Linda and Blanche.

The Earl is still with us - sitting on a shelf in Himself's study - but Merddin was donated as a gift to an FR luminary. I think of it now and then and hope it is being well cared for.