Grime

Himself has begun weathering the Tool Van, starting with the end doors.

The rest of the wagon will also be made to look a lot grimier and unloved.

This weathering business is quite a recent departure for us.

For years we kept all our fleet of locos and rolling stock looking as they were on the day they left the paint shop.

I suspect it was mostly down to a mortal fear of buggering up the finish of a model you'd spent ages building and painstakingly painting but in recent years Himself has been working hard on refining his artistic skills with an airbrush and learning from some of the excellent tutorial DVD's on the market.

Having said all that, I doubt whether he's ready to cover his beloved Backwoods Garratts in a layer of filth yet. Good job the F&WHR crews keep them looking spick and span.

Yard Work

A new fiddle yard for the Caernarfon end of the layout means we will be able to put on a better show for the visitors to WHR Super Power - Great & Small at Dinas next weekend.

It's still only a temporary arrangement but it will allow us to run longer, and more representative, train formations than before when we had lashed up one of the yards from our other layout Dduallt which can only handle 5 carr sets.

Himself has retrieved one of the untouched baseboards from storage to be adapted for the job at Dinas.

It's a good opportunity to show you how be build our baseboards which deploy an open framework supported by two L shaped longitudinal girders.

For its role as a fiddle yard the board is having a sheet of plywood fixed in place but this will in time be removed and a sinuous trackbed piece will be cut out and put in its place supported on risers.

These next photos show how it's been laid out with three sidings in an arc to make them as long as possible.

Isolating sections have been added at the end of each of them to enable a us to run a new locomotive onto the Porthmadog end of the train for the return journey.

To help you orientate yourselves I should point out that this board sits behind the board with the north end of the Beddgelert station platform (to the right of the picture below) and will eventually form part of the S bend around Cwm Cloch.

I'm beginning to get really excited about the prospect of 3 days playing with the layout again at Dinas - it's nearly 18 months since we last had it up and running. Too long.

Streetscape

There isn't going to be a lot of time to develop the layout further before we take it to Wales to show at the Welsh Highland 'Super Power - Great & Small' event - it's spent most of the last six months in storage - but Himself has been able to do a little work to landscape a corner of the Oberon Wood housing estate around the two houses I recently built.

The houses are not fixed in place yet because they still need to be painted by the Artistic Director, but it will allow them to be shown in a little more context at Dinas.

Tool Van Varnished

Now that Himself has access to his extended workshop once again he has been able to get his airbrush out again. (The boss won't allow it in the house.)

First in the queue for a coat of varnish is my model of the WHR tool van which was built up on a DZ wagon chassis which has been given one of Himself's excellent paint jobs.

I'm particularly impressed with the way he's picked out the edging of the cupboard at the back and the running number transfers on the blue panels.

This tool van will be one of a number of new items of rolling stock you will get to see if you make it along to visit us at the WHR Super Power - Great & Small event at Dinas next month.

Pony Progess

Welsh Pony is close to getting on her wheels.

Having obtained the correct etches for the chassis from Mercian, Himself has made good progress putting it together.

It's quire intricate for a 009 chassis as you can see below.

As you can see the chassis is not on its wheels yet and there is no sign of any drive train, That is because, as I wrote in a previous post, the gearbox we received with the kit does not fit together - some of the gears foul the motor - and even if you could get the gearbox together it would not fit beneath the saddle tank.

Himself has been given the contact details of some other modellers who have succeeded in making one of these kits move and we await their wisdom.

Plotting Buildings

There has been activity on the layout for the first time in many months.

The enforced break has been due to the construction of an extension to Himself's garage cum workshop which is now complete.

The enlarged space will allow him to erect the full length of Bron Hebog, although not the entire width, and should make life a lot easier.

Now the layout has been retrieved from the builder's yard where it was being stored - boy, am I relieved to see it back unscathed! - Himself has been spending a little time finalising the position of the first two Oberon Wood houses which I completed earlier in the summer.

I think they look rather good in position. What do you think?

Ready At Last

After many months of patient design work the final components to complete the NGY ballast wagon kits arrived last week - the etched brass frets with the bogies, the hand wheels and the cogs for the ballast door mechanism.

I was surprised and delighted to discover the company which carries out the etching is based here in Scotland in Lochgilphead in Argyll, which is rather ironic when you consider that they are normally sent as part of a larger batch of etches down to Narrow Planet HQ on the south coast of England before being sent back up across the border to me here in Ayrshire.

And I then sent then on their travels, yet again, as part of the kits.

(The Royal Mail's doing rather well out of this little cottage industry!)

So in the last few days I have been able to dispatch the first batch of kits to customers who placed advanced reservations.

If you would like to see what one of the kits looks like made up take a look at the Boston Largs Works blog where I have posted some snaps of a wagon I completed for a client.