Penblwydd Hapus

Doesn’t time fly? Here we are a year old from my first posting on this blog and so perhaps you will forgive me for a moment of self-congratulatory reflection.

So what’s been achieved in the world of Bron Hebog?

Well, on the layout itself, absolutely bugger all! (But, in fairness, the team were evicted from their ‘clubroom’ early last year and there aren’t many places you can erect a 25 x 25 foot layout to work on it as a whole) Hopefully the summer of 2011 will see more progress. We’ll have to because a year from now we’re committed to taking Bron Hebog to a major NG exhibition in the south of England, for the long-awaited head-the-head with another 009 WHR layout. (Let’s not have ourselves shown up, boys!)

2011, though, has seen some big progress on the rolling stock front.
We’ve seen 2 Backwoods Garratts completed. NGG16 87 has been finished and turned out in photographic grey livery...



And after many years languishing in primer our K1 has been magnificently lined out by Himself...



Another long-running project which has reached a conclusion is the KMX Tamper. (Log in again later this week to see pictures of it completed.)

I kept churning out the carriages. We’ve had FR Super-Barn 103 built....

There have been two service carrs completed....



Himself has begun painting the backlog of WHR saloons..




There have been so many Barns I’ve almost lost count, but let’s try... 1 x 100 (for a client) 1 x 102 (for a client) 2 x 105 (one for me, one for a client) 106 (for me) and I’m about to begin work on a 123 (that’s what used to be Obs Carr 101 which has reappeared as a 3rd class, Blaenau-facing Obs).

It’s been wagons roll as well. There have been six AY ballast wagons turned out ( 4 in 4mm scale and 2 7mm giants)



There have been 2 Romanian super-ballast wagons coming off the production line and 4 DZ’s.

As for the stats, I’ve only had counters running since June but in that time we’ve had 12 and half thousand page impressions from damn near 2 thousand unique visitors from 42 countries. Not bad methinks.

(Although in the interests of fairness I should point out that for these purposes the Isle of Man counts as a country and I don’t think everyone was necessarily logging on for a narrow gauge modelling fix. I rather suspect the one Nigerian visitor was hoping I would help him access the frozen assets of his late Great Uncle thrice removed, and quite what my singular Thai visitor was looking for I can’t begin to imagine – but the Traffic Source breakdown provided by Google Analytics shows some rather saucy URL’s clicked on the posts titled ‘Shafted’ and ‘Rods For My Back’).

I do hope you’ve been enjoying logging on and reading about all this in the last year and thanks in particular to everyone who’s made the effort to leave comments. It’s great to get feedback on the blog and I hope more of you will leave your mark in the coming year.