Floor Filling

The interior of 2046, the new Welsh Highland carriage, has taken a big jump forward in the last few days.

I cast 7 sets of the seats and tables and glued them into position.

I was pretty pleased with the way the design worked. Some of them required a little filing to ensure the seat backs lined up with the window pillars but the table heights are perfect with the waist line on the carriage.

A final job was to make up the tipping / swivelling seat at one end out of a couple of bits of styrene.

Then I turned it over and tackled the underfloor area which calls for a lot more modelling.

The WHR carriages have become a little more complicated down there over the years.

The first batch of Winson-built carriages in the late 1990's had everything hidden behind a long, boxy skirt, as you can see at the top edge.

Now, however, Boston Lodge install fancy things like diesel powered heating and so there are various tanks and drawers and others such things visible which have to be modelled.

Those of you who have built any of my Boston Largs Works SAR wagon kits might spot how I've employed some of the brass brake parts under there and cut down some others to fit.

I also hacked off the resin brake cylinder from a scrap wagon chassis to glue into place on this carriage.

It has the same fins around the edge as the SAR ones (Boston Lodge may even have used a spare SAR one for all I know)  so waste-not, want-not, eh?

New Toys On Test

The show at the weekend was the first chance to give our newest locomotives a proper test run.

The one that did the most mileage was our 3rd Backwoods Garratt 138 which went into regular service straight 'off the workbench'.

It will in time be finished in the locomotive's current red livery and as running coal-fired.

Also getting a run out was Himself's impulse purchase, an RT Models kit of one-time FR resident Peckett tank Harrogate.

He was inspired to make a model after seeing the real thing in action while were exhibition the layout at Dinas on the WHR last year. It was on loan from the Statfold Barn Railway.

I believe I'm right in saying that the locomotive has yet to traverse the full WHR so this picture of it emerging from Cutting Mawr is a bit of futurology.

Even more improbable was our double heading of our new Brian Madge Britomart and Mercian Models Welsh Pony - not only because Pony is in the very early stages of a scandalously overdue restoration (in my humble opinion) but also because, as others have already pointed out, it's highly unlikely the pair of them could ever haul this length of train up the hill to Beddgelert.

Although I think I know a driver who given half a chance would give it a go!

Those there at the time also witnessed a minor miracle in seeing one of these Mercian England engine kits moving given that the gearbox, as designed, will not fit inside the locomotive.  It's taken all of Himself's ingenuity to make this model work.

I have a big soft spot for Welsh Pony - indeed I am one of the regular donors to the restoration fund - and I think this model's going to become one of my favourites.

Seat Master

In the end I decided to sort out the interior for the new carriage rather than tackle the stuff under the floor.

And as I have a feeling that there will be more of these design of WHR carriages rolling out of Boston Lodge in the years ahead I've decided to cast the seats this time so I can easily them out as required in future.

I used the same tactic with the FR superbarns last year when I had to make a big batch of the carriages.

However I couldn't use the same master for this one because the WHR carriage seats are slightly bigger and with a simpler seat back design as you can see above.

The way the design of this casting works is to have the table tops cast separately and then glued onto a base which doubles as a spacer to help me position each seat / table combo in place in the carriage.

Learning Curves

Taking a layout on the road for the first time is always going to show up little snags and so it proved at Woking.

There was nothing fundamental that stopped the layout operating - no phantom short circuit that required an on-the-spot rewire as some layouts have experienced - just some minor irritations like those devilish little pony wheels on an NGG16 derailing.

Getting these beasties back on the rails can be a maddening task - sometimes requiring Himself to don two pairs of specs - and it's not made any easier by those power units having such bulky, overhanging tanks and bunkers.

After much close observation - and tiresome re-railing - the problem was traced to one of the board joints in the middle which had moved out of alignment.

This was not due to an error in construction so much as the manner of construction.

Our boards, you see, were built sequentially, in a linear fashion, like most standard layouts, and the track joints were aligned longitudinally. But Bron Hebog is very unusual in having such depth and some of the boards towards the centre of the layout are connected laterally and well as length ways.

So when it was put together as one unit we discovered that the forces acting in all four directions for the first time pushed (or pulled) one of the joints slightly out of alignment. Enough to throw off those pesky little pony wheels - although everything else stayed on.

The other issue with the layout - which had been predicted from the outset of the project - is that there is a section of the track in the middle which is all but impossible to reach when it's all put up.

And guess where the dodgy board joint in question was??

Thus the otherwise simple task of getting out the soldering iron and resetting the joint forced Himself to contort his physique into positions no pensioner should ever attempt..

The other snagging point was one of the cow-catchers on the power units of our new NGG16 138 would brush the top of the rails where the track dips in Goat Tunnel causing a momentary short.

That should be easy to address by bending the brass parts upwards.

As for the dip we're just going to have to live with that because that can't be fixed without taking the top off the tunnel!

A Few More Pictures

Thanks to Jonathan Walsh for sharing these with us.

Woking - Day 1

A few snatched snaps from the first day of the first show for the final-size Bron Hebog for you to enjoy.

If you'd like to see some others then may I suggest you 'like' our Bron Hebog page on Facebook where people who came along to the show are sharing some of their pictures.

Here It Is!

The complete Bron Hebog!

These snaps were taken after setting it all up for the very first time at the exhibition in Woking last night.

It's a proud moment for the team after more than a decade designing and then building the layout.

If you'd like to come and see us this weekend details of the show can be found on our Exhibition Diary page.