Our world in miniature, hobbies

Hello, Just as I was leaving home this morning, the sunlight streaming through the east railway room window was illuminating areas that are so difficult to photo.

I never noticed the fork lift truck before. The sunlight does bring it alive

Hello & thank you Helen, The first picture is Mill Hill, that's the tunnel entrance to the array of behind the main scene fiddle yards, but I call it Three Spires Junc. That's Longford where the diesel forklift is. There's scale deceit going on there. That corner of the railway is four feet away from any access so maintenance requires a ladder & crawling board. The windmill is half of the scale size, being 2ml to the foot, rather than the railway scale of 4ml. From four feet away, without the telescopic lenses of my camera, it attempts to give a sense of distance.

Hello, All is quiet as the sleepers sleep on bank holiday Monday, at Bramble Lane. Not much going on in Grove shed either. There is a small Western Region small 2-6-2 prairie in there, but that's asleep too.

Hello, I do like trucks, or to give them their correct title, box vans. The brown colour indicates that they are continuous vacuum braked. Madonna had a song called "This used to be my playground". It figured in her life when in spite of her fame & fortune, she possibly suffered a breakdown period. Well, I can see where the words of her song are coming from. If I had a lot on my mind, I would often escape to my bolt holes, to think it through. More often than not, a goods yard was for me a bolt hole. Watching the motionless trucks.

"The brown colour indicates that they are continuous vacuum braked." And there was me thinking that they were brown because they were wood.

Hello Helen, Grey for unbraked vans & trucks. Some grey vans did have a through pipe, so a that the pipe could connect to brown trucks either side. Of course, the loco needed to have the vacuum break facility, so did the guards vans. The lamp code at the front of the loco indicated to railway staff & signal-folk (can't say men now), what class of freight the train was & what percentage of the train was braked. Oh it all made work for the working man to do, so the song says.

Hello All at rest.

Hello, Not being careful, or possibly over zealous with the vacuuming, I discovered that a buffer was missing from my first ever model DMU. I must be more careful. Bachmann spares came to the rescue with a delivery this morning. It's such a strategic part of the front of the train, that a generic spare would have been awful. It's a beautiful model, that all I've added is the corridor connectors. I've several in different livery & era. In service I never liked them, but that's how the system went. They've become classics in there own right, the Severn Valley heritage railway runs Friday evening fish & chip suppers using a vintage DMU. I do love & live our railway here at home. It comes alive to me. I put a lot into it, but it's still nothing more than an old bloke playing trains.

My vac makes a terrible noise when it sucks up anything hard. If I'm lucky it gets trapped in the compartment at the top. If I'm unlucky I have to pick through the woolly dust monster nest at the bottom. I had a vision of an apprentice trying to explain how he lost the buffer off a real train.

Now don't go and smash my imagination Philip, you are just a kid at heart. Maybe we all are when we visit your station.

Hello This is my favourite activity, either using water colour paints or as here dry scatter material applied with diluted PVA glue. A bit of Autumn creeping in. By the Middle of October, unless we have bright blue sky sunshine, it's impossible to set the colours in artificial light. Even with daylight spot lights, there's nothing like natural daylight.

Hello, Two Midland region steam moguls are in Holbrooks this morning. I enjoyed the company of a visitor yesterday afternoon, where we wandered into Hall Brooks to enjoy a play trains time. I went into the railway room this morning, only to see a mogul in the coal siding at Longford.

A fresh from overhaul original Stanier mogul, resting in Hounds hill after bringing the daily pickup goods from Coventry.

Hello, The class of mogul in my last picture, an example is main-stream on the Severn Valley railway this year. I saw it on my pork pie enjoyment day out there, it dressed in its original LMS livery & numbering.