Finishing Touches On The Tanker

A couple of weeks ago I handed over my new WHR water tank wagon for Himself to have a tinker with.

He's stuck on the transfers.

There's lots of other tiny wee technical blurb on the real one but quite frankly life's too short!

I also left it for him to make and attach the footstep which you can see at the right hand end of the frame.

These are hangers-on (excuse the pun) from the chassis' days as a DZ wagon but strangely it only still has one at one end.

He'll give it a protective spray of varnish before it join the fleet for the show at Dinas next weekend.

There may be some squabbling about what we do with it.

His idea is that we'll leave it parked in the siding at Beddgelert where the real one spends a lot of its time as an mobile emergency source of water in the event of a major lineside fire.

I , on the other hand, would prefer to see it hung behind one of the NGG16's at the head of a full rake of SAR freight stock.

I wonder who will get their way?

Loaves And Fishes

Exhibiting both Bron Hebog and Dduallt at Dinas next month is going to require a lot of thought in rolling stock distribution between the two layouts.

Even when the two railways were disconnected there was an element of FR stock being shared with the WHR and ever since the '40 Mile Railway' became a reality that process has accelerated.

In modelling terms we have done our best to keep pace with the construction of new carriages, and restoration of locomotives as we built Bron Hebog, but we did not necessarily make duplicates of the FR stock which operates on the railway, failing to foresee a situation where we would have to operate them simultaneously.

So how are we going to get by over the Super Power weekend?

Well fortunately we have managed to keep pace with a lot of the FR carriage refurbishment programme so, for example, we have models of the 1st generation observation carriages 100 & 101 as well as their replacements 100 & 102.

We also have four of the new 'Super Barn' carriages, the service carr 124 and Stefco's 122.

Locomotive-wise we have modern interlopers like Lyd which were only being dreamt about when we started building Dduallt in the early 1990's.

So my plan is to conserve rolling stock by running Dduallt in an early 1990's configuration.

This means we can keep back locomotives like DLG, Taliesin, Vale of Ffestiniog, Lyd and Palmerston to bulk out the train roster on Bron Hebog along with the carriages built for the FR over the last 20 years, while hopefully still having enough trains from the earlier era to provide interest on Dduallt.