Dduallt On TV - Monday 9pm

Our 009 layout - and Himself - will feature in a programme on BBC4 on Monday night.

Dduallt was filmed for the programme called The Golden Age of Steam Railways a few months ago.

The programme will tell the story of the revival of the Festiniog Railway and the great Deviation project of the 1960s and 1970s. The producers asked to use our layout to explain how the spiral was constructed by the Deviationists at Dduallt and give viewers a better appreciation of the scale of what was acheived soley by volunteer labour.

The camera wasn't just trained (geddit?) on the layout because they also filmed interviews with Himself, and he'll be watching nervously to see how much of his contritbution made it through into the final edit.

You can read more about the prgramme here on the BBC website.

Please do let us know what you thought of it.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Dduallt and Himself are set to be TV stars.

A crew from Available Light Productions came along to film the layout yesterday.

The footage is to be used for a two part programme for BBC Four called 'The Golden Age of Steam.'

The first of the programmes, will be about the revival of the Welsh narrow gauge and one of the main narrative threads of the episode will be the building of the Deviation and the construction of the current 'Earl of Merioneth' at Boston Lodge.

So how come they've been pointing a camera at our layout?

The producer told me when they were going through the footage they filmed on the FR a few weeks ago they realised they could do with some shots that showed the spiral in the context of the wider landscape and the original route to Blaenau.

Hiring a helicopter for aerial filming wasn't an option so they asked the FR's PR department if the railway, by any chance, had a model of the spiral?

'No, we don't', they replied. 'But we know some blokes who do.'

So yesterday they filmed our trains running around the spiral - hauled, appropriately, by our model of 'The Square' and also recorded some interviews with Himself talking about the making of the layout and the stock (which I suspect he may secretly be hoping ends up on the cutting room floor - or whatever the digital equivalent is these days).

We'll find out next spring when the programme is due to be screened.