ESNG meeting – 16/04/2014

Posted on April 17, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

This can best be described as a typical post-show meeting.  After a very, very, slow start, we did have 10 members turn up, but there was no move to put a circuit up, and we were very happy to sit and chat and drink teas and coffees.

There was the usual show post-mortem, that was generally positive.  The club second (or more) hand shop was a great success and added a little more to club funds.  We are not exactly sure of the cash balance from the show, as the treasurer has gone on holiday (only to Norfolk, so we couldn’t have made that much money!)  However, we are sure that a small profit was made, that is a good thing, as the exhibition is our one income in the year.

Another item for discussion was the date of next year’s show.  We have tried to miss the dates of neighbouring shows, but this year, with free car parking, a fair number of people were taking in both our show and the larger Crawley club one 10 miles away in Horsham.  We need to decide this, then start planning for next year.

Last night was not wasted though.  Duncan started rebuilding the cable car on Alpenbahn, and Allan and Derek turned out the club cupboard and started some maintenance to the fiddle yard.

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ERIC goes American

Posted on April 15, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

Also seen at the ESNG show this year was Eric the roundhouse full of my American locomotives.  We’ve had Eric full of (UK) Southern Railway Pacific’s, and full of Taurus electric’s.  But this year, it was full of REAL locomotives – mainly Alco’s and mainly Lehigh Valley.  There was even a GG1 electric that must have been towed in from somewhere.

One interesting observation on this line-up of super-power was the different interpretations of Lehigh Valley red by different, and sometimes the same, manufacturers.  Early Lehigh red is a difficult shade to define.  The later red was a bright scarlet colour, but the red the first generation diesels were painted is a sort of medium red with a slight pinkish hue.  There is a commercial paint available, but it is too dark, probably being mixed from the original specification, rather than adapted, with a lighter tone, for small models.

The models below range from a dark pink to a full maroon – and none of them look quite right.  However, photographs show as big a range of colour, even allowing for the inaccuracies and degradation of early colour film.  My own view is that I ought to choose one shade and repaint all these models to that one mix.  It may not be right, but at least it will be consistent.  Or maybe one shade, with varying amounts of white added for different models, to give a more realistic range of colours like the prototype?

Again, photos below and more on the ESNG club web site.

P1030694 P1030669 P1030668 P1030667

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ESNG 2014 Exhibition – the day after!

Posted on April 13, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

Well, we’ve got through another exhibition, and it seems to have been a success.  At least, all the club members enjoyed it, and we received plenty of compliments from the exhibitors and the visitors.  Numbers were good.  Not quite as many as last year, which is perhaps not surprising moving to a new venue, but enough to make the halls look busy, and give enough business to persuade the traders to part with their money for rental of table space.

The school worked very well as a venue.  Having free car parking on site was a real bonus, and compensated for the show being a few minutes walk from the town centre.  It was also good that the show was all on one level, and there were no ‘hidden’ rooms tucked around corners for people to miss (although one or two made a real effort to miss all four classrooms with most of the show in them).  It made things a lot easier that we could get into the school early Friday evening to start setting things up at a measured pace.

We also were privileged to have a visit from ‘The Commentator’, a gentleman who walks around exhibition describing loudly all he sees – whether anyone is listening or not.

Thanks to all the club members who worked so hard to make the day work so well.  But a special thanks to Derek Apps, who was wearing two hats all day, as school caretaker and also ESNG treasurer.  All Derek’s preparatory work around the school made setting up very easy.  And thanks too for Ian Carter and his team of glamorous assistants who worked very hard on the catering.  This is the first year for a long time we did our own catering, and Ian got it just about right.

Below, I’ve posted a few pictures from the day.  There are more on the ESNG website.

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And PS, my wife’s hip-hop-op seems to have gone OK…..

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I’m not optimistic

Posted on April 10, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

Reading the local paper and Network Rail’s website I find the good news that….

More trains and more seats as Network Rail kicks off five-year £2.3bn programme in South East

This includes…..

Sussex – Passengers in Sussex will also see some major changes, including the construction of an extra platform at Redhill, to increase capacity at the station…..

Good news – an extra platform (perhaps replacing the old Post Office bay on the east side of the station.

Bad news – last time I looked, Redhill was in Surrey.  Hope they build it in the right place!!

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Countdown to ESNGtacy (with apologies to Steely Dan)

Posted on April 8, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

We panic onwards towards the 12th April and the ESNG show.  Of course, it all happens at once doesn’t it.  My wife is due for a hip replacement on the same day (hi-op not to be confused with hip-hop), but luckily she has to check in at the hospital at 7am, so she’ll be dropped at the door and I’ll be off to the school to set up.  And my mother passed away on Sunday – at 94 not unexpected, and quite peacefully, sad but not devastating.  So there are just a few more jobs to do this week.  I’ve decided that they put all the nice people in local government and pensions and the like on the help desk for the recently deceased.  I have to say that everyone has been really helpful.

But the show must go on (I feel another song coming on).  The show guide is off to the printers (see below), I’ve tracked down almost all the exhibitors (please do turn up, all of you) and the banners are around the town.  All we need to do is get things set up and running, even, and hope the punters turn up.

esng_guide

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Bluebell photo-fest

Posted on April 6, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

Here are a dozen photos from a family visit to the Bluebell Railway in 2003.  The Bluebell was one of the earliest preserved lines in the UK, and is still one of the best.  My daughter must have been all of 11 in these photographs, as she hit the tender age of 21 last October!  I’ll leave you to ‘spot’ the locomotives in the pictures.  Following on from my post on ‘N’ gauge, I think all but one are available, or soon to be available in ‘OO’ gauge – but for that matter, the majority are also available in ‘N’.

CNV00030 CNV00035 CNV00025 CNV00031 CNV00038 CNV00027 CNV00039 CNV00032 CNV00033 CNV00021 CNV00023 CNV00034

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ESNG meeting, 4 April 2014

Posted on April 4, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

Last meeting before the exhibition!  Predictably, we spent a lot of time discussing logistics.  Who will be doing what, when can the van pick up layouts, when can we get into the school.

We did have one scare last week, when Surrey County Council announced that it was resurfacing the road past the school starting the week before the show.  Help!!!!  This is logical, of course, to do the work in the school holidays, be we want to get 100+ cars plus vans into the school over the weekend.  However, a few phone calls revealed that there had been such a public outcry that they were only resurfacing part of the road – the part away from the school.  We breathed again.

My only complication is that my wife heard that the date for her hip replacement is the Saturday of the show.  But actually, that will work better than if it had been before.  She is booked in to arrive at the hospital at 7am, so I’m afraid she will be dropped at the door, and I’ll go off to carry on setting up the show.  I may have to miss the traditional post-show curry, though, and that would be a shame….

Back to club night, we did get the usual circuit up and running, with a nice variety of trains from the UK, USA, Switzerland, Austria and Japan.  Of course, just before the show, one controller is playing up, but better to find that out now.

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Why N gauge?

Posted on April 1, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

I seemed to have wandered away from N gauge modelling in recent posts.  So with my 100th post on the blog, it’s back to my roots (for now) and to ask the question, why model in N gauge.

A little background may be in order.  I started with model trains with a Hornby clockwork ‘O’ gauge system on the floor of the living room.  Great fun!  At the age of 10, my father and I upgraded to ‘OO’ gauge with a 6×4 and then 7×5 layout.  We started at a reasonable standard, with Peco track and points (when they first came out!)

In my mid-teens, the 7×5 became a shelf layout along one side of my bedroom, and then we built a 9×8 shed in the back garden – a cosy empire with heat, light and insulation.  Best of all, in winter you could turn the heat on from the house to warm the shed up before venturing outside.  We built a continuous run layout round the walls, but reading the model magazine convinced us of the need for a fiddle yard / staging, so the final layout in the shed was the classing end-to-end branchline – Southern of course!  I learnt a lot about model building at that time, and scratch built a few coaches (quite respectable) and tried a loco or two (kit built, OK, scratch build, far less so).

Then to university and dabbling in the Great Eastern in EM.  Followed by flat sharing and marriage.  Railways took a back seat, but moving to a house in Redhill meant we had a loft space, and I returned to ‘O’ gauge.  I still have the kit and scratch built stock from this era.  Moving house in Redhill and converting the new house’s loft into a fourth bedroom was the end of modelling for a while.

Then, 15 years ago, ESNG approached Earlswood Baptist church with a request for the club to meet in the church hall.  I was on the church leadership team at the time (and I still am), and knowing my interests I was told, ‘Jon, you can liaise with them’.  So I not only liaised, but also joined the club and went ‘N’ gauge, and quickly adopting USA outline as having reliable models and interesting prototypes.

Yet walking around Alexandra Palace last weekend, I was thinking, why do I model in ‘N’?  I came away still very satisfied with the scale, and really quite uninspired with the other scales.  Why?  I suggest there are a number of factors involved:

  • ‘N’ is small enough to fit in the house.
  • ‘N’ allows me to model trains in a landscape, rather than just a railway.
  • It’s getting quite rare to see an ‘OO’ (and larger) layout that really appeals.  People seem to have done everything, and the classic GWR branchline is, to quote a well known phrase, boring if nice.  ‘N’ layouts often still manage to do something a little different.
  • ‘N’ models are still improving release by release.  It’s exciting to see the advances made in quality and reliability, now matching the larger scales.
  • There are just too many commercial models in ‘OO’.  I can now buy off the shelf most of the models I hankered after or tried to build as a teenager – a T9, and N class 2-6-0, a King Arthur 4-6-0, and M7, a Beattie Well Tank, an O2 coming, a C 0-6-0.  The list goes on….  Really, it’s just become too expensive and easy!  Perhaps this will change as ‘N’ improves further?

The future?  I may go back to scratch building in ‘O’ gauge if my eyes give up on ‘N’.  I do like making things, and an ‘O’ gauge trolley layout would be small enough for my now reclaimed loft.  Or for a real challenge, what about ‘S’?  Then I would really have to build nearly everything!  And then there is the other challenge to dabble in fine scale 2mm…..  Whatever!  There’s more than enough to keep me interested in this excellent hobby!!

Posted in Inspiration, Jon's layout ramblings, Layout design, N Club International, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 3 Comments

EVEN MORE SHEEP

Posted on March 29, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

Keeping the antipodean theme, I enjoy blogs for the modelling knowledge worldwide. And the particular challenges of modelling different parts of the world. Here in Australia, the challenge is enough sheep….

BURROWA's avatarBurrowa is an HO scale model railway set in the NSW southern tablelands

An update on the sheep – there have been 80 beasts added to the flock on both sides of the track, so here they are grazing in the morning sun.

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Sugar cane railways – 1

Posted on March 27, 2014 by snitchthebudgie

In 2010, Maxine and I we fortunate enough to spend two fantastic weeks Queensland, in the general area of Cairns. We used the conventional Australian check-list, from “I-Spy Australia”.

  • Shark (small friendly 6 ft one) – tick!
  • Snake (harmless 4 ft one) – tick!
  • Crocodile (medium sized and also in burger) – tick!
  • Kookaburra (lots including one almost on our balcony) – tick!
  • Duck billed platypus (three of them) – tick!
  • Kangaroos (and wallabies) – tick!
  • Leeches (3 made unsuccessful attack on legs) – tick!
  • Drongo (the bird species) – tick!
  • Cassowary (father plus chick) – very, very, big tick!!!!

This list reveals my other time-consuming hobby – bird watching (mostly of the feathered kind).  Similar to train spotting, really, as I have a big database of worldwide sightings.  Just the objects of interest are more difficult to find, as they don’t run on rails to a timetable.

But we also saw a few trains….  Best of all were the sugar-cane lines.  Around 2 foot gauge, these are laid out like a big train set around a sugar refining works, with loops here and there to load the cane, and random turnouts and branches following the field edges.  Our first train, about 50 trucks long, was crossing the road as we approached Mossman.

P1000424 

And finally, just to show that there are short cane trains around, we came across this one, with only a dozen trucks, running crossing the prosaically named ‘Bruce Highway’ on the way back to Cairns.

P1000486

Of course, my thoughts turned to modelling potential!  Not a great variety in stock, but very interesting tropical locations.  For those interested, this site for Queensland is excellent, as is this one worldwide.  Backwoods Minatures make OO9 kits of Fiji sugar cane railways, that might be near enough for a small diorama or model.

xfwldm xhc2

I’ll blog about the sugar cane works another time.

Posted in Inspiration, Out and about, Prototype | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment