Taking Stock

Taking a new layout on the road has prompted Himself to rethink the storage of our rolling stock.

We've used these very safe and sturdy bespoke wooden boxes for a number of years now with Dduallt but the order in which the carriages were laid out in the rows was becoming increasingly anachronistic.

The formation of FR carriage sets changed greatly in the years between us first showing the layout in the mid-1990's to the present day, with new carriages being built, others rebuilt and re-using the numbers - and in many cases that was all the shared with the previous one - and the order in which they were marshalled mucked about with.

All the new models we built to keep up with developments on the FR, and all the new WHR stock, was stored in an ad hoc fashion in a new set of boxes and not in any formation that related to the order they were running on the real railway.

As the years went on it was taking longer and longer to get the stock transferred from the boxes into their formations on the layout, and became a right faff when it was time to dismantle the layout at the end of the exhibition.

So this is how the boxes are laid out now.

Here's the main WHR carriage fleet...

And the main FR box...

It still contains some glaring anomalies for a 21st Century WHR layout - like the push-pull set in its two tone green livery. Yes there is enough replica building to keep me occupied for a number of years.