Mute Moelwyn No More - Hopefully

I am not one of life's gamblers.  

If you needed to stick a label on me it would definitely be the one marked 'Risk Averse'.

So you can probably imagine it was a 'moment' to entrust our precious Moelwyn to the care of our elite posties for a 400 mile trip across the UK to see a man who's kindly offered to help convert it for DCC operation with sound for use on Minffordd.

Were it a model one could buy off-the-shelf then if anything unfortunate happened one could simply curse one's luck and dip into the piggy bank for a replacement.

Sadly, it's not the case with a kit built loco such as our trusty Baldwin Gas Mechanical.

This excellent kit has been in production from time to time over the years, but I reckon I've seen more Backwoods Garratts come up for sale that one of these - and that's saying something!

So it really was a leap of faith to hand that parcel over!

I'm pleased to say it has arrived, safety, and on time  (well done, Royal Mail!) and I'm told it will be going into the workshop imminently.

The challenge with this model is not simply wiring in a chip and speaker - first it will be necessary to make room for them.

At the moment all that space under the bonnet is taken up with a (superb) Mashima motor.

The idea is to replace that with something much, much smaller.  Probably in the shape of a shiny coreless cylinder, which will buy some space for the digital gubbins.

How much space is the question which will only be answered when work starts.

It may be that other places will have to be found to hide the speaker or stay alive as much out of sight as is possible.

However, for now, it's just good to know that we're taking action on something we've wanted to make happen for quite a while now.

I look forward to being able to post progress updates soon.

Return To Sender

There's an easy trap to fall into when you're blogging of using your posts to have a rant.

It's something I've tried hard to avoid but I suppose it doesn't hurt to let off steam every now and then.

And the source of my displeasure today is our recently flogged off (far too cheaply) Royal Mail.

I've been very busy in the last few weeks casting yet another batch of SAR/WHR wagon kits to restock the Ffestiniog Railway shop - they've been selling them as fast as I can make them this summer.

I've got a job lot almost ready to dispatch and all I'm waiting on is a resupply of the brass bogie frets.

And this is where the postie comes in. Or more to the point, hasn't!

Despite being posted a week ago these frets have yet to turn up here and a little investigation (nothing gets past a trained reporter) reveals they have been ricocheting up and down the United Kingdom for the past seven days.

The package got to within a couple of hundred yards of my letterbox but it transpired there was one number missing on the address - an easy mistake to make - but as it was a signed for package my neighbour down the road denied all knowledge and refused to take it in.

The postie apparently scratched his head - because they don't wear caps anymore, standards have slipped! - and took it back to the sorting office where they decided to return it whence it came to the south coast of England.

(These bogie parts were, I believe, originally etched in deepest Argyll so they have recorded quite a considerable mileage by now..)

What annoys me is that apparently no one made much of an effort to attempt to redeliver them to the correct address and instead took the easy way out and returned them to sender.

It's not as if I'm unknown. They've been delivering mail to me at this address for 5 years! The postcode was correct, the street address was correct. Surely someone must have twigged?

For all I know the same postie most likely had other (junk) mail for my household which he pushed through my letter box just a few seconds later. But it appears not to have registered.

Thinking about it some more I am astonished that an organisation such as the Royal Mail - which came up with the postcode system for goodness sake! - doesn't have a database where they can tap in a name and a postcode and match them up with a house number.

I bet any number of double glazing firms or ambulance-chasing let-us-sue-for-u merchants have that data at their fingertips. But not, it appears, the postie.

I am, as you might have gathered, ever so slightly peeved.