All Activity

Slowing down again here....

You do realise you won't be ale to find anything now! John Bruce.

Definitely around 2000 there was al regular Sunday turn on the Enterprise

Yescandvhey we're all using child ickets bought from the ticket machine!

Presumably this was before rolling stock needed different signalling/comms equipment to travel cross-border?

Correct-circa 1995.

I have spent most of the afternoon having a grand tidy-up and clearing the decks for some holiday projects. As well as more work on the layout I will be working on some rolling stock, as a have quite a stash of things to work through. A little progress on the layout this evening has seen the lighting extended to the fiddle yard, focused on the sector plate areas where I'll need to align the tracks: I have been transplanting a few trees to get the best look. They all slot into holes in the board, so at they stage they can be moved, but once the groundcover is done then they'll be stuck in. Here's a general view of the layout. The end pieces of the fascia have been made and are shown just clamped in place. I still need to do the top and bottom sections: One of the jobs on the list for this week is to regauge the Murphy 141. I'll also fit a decoder and kadee couplers, and renumber it to 156 which is a personal favourite of mine and was also one of the first to receive the supertrain livery. It will be suitable motive power for a bitumen train. And a bitumen tank is another project for this week. Watch this space. This length of train will fit on the sector plate and the loco can also run round it in the loop. It's short but not unrealistically short for this branch, and feels like it's in 'scale' with the layout. If there are already some wagons in the sidings when the train arrives then the shunting could be quite involved. Anything much longer doesn't fit. As an alternative to the 3 wagons, I could also have 2 30' coaches, or 1 bogie coach. When I start thinking about visiting railtours (to add operational variety) then the one real example was a bogie coach and a tin van. Another nice (but fictional) rake to model would be two old 6-wheel coaches and a tin van. To handle those, it would be possible for me to extend the sector plate by 6" or so, overhanging the end of the board. But now I'm thinking too far ahead - I'll leave that to the future if it seems necessary.

Two IR trains in Lisburn and a loco on its own, probably running round its train suggests the line was blocked between Lisburn and Belfast by a bomb scare or similar.

Did they stay on it the whole way to Belfast?

Did a Dundalk 2600 set not work a Sunday relief PORTADOWN - CONNOLLY [ about 1800 ] for a while ? I can't put a date on it - maybe in late 1990's.

Lovely modelling! Maybe they’re all trying to work out a story to explain the missing crate of beer?

I get the idea that it slows down in office hours, late afternoon -evenings it picks up.

The class 47 works a RTC test train with a DBSO undergoing testing.

Not a lot happening at the Kilmore goods shed today.

But of course!

This looks very impressive!

Class looking, the helix really looks the part.

Something tells me yer man hasn't been to Confession in a long while....

After a nearly two year hiatus, Middlemark V2.0 is under construction in a new, larger shed. The lower storage level to one side of the shed has been installed and the helix extracted from storage and fixed in position. We have taken the opportunity to improve things compared to the old shed. All levels are 3in higher up from the floor and the helix has been fixed away from the walls to enable a track to run behind it to feed the storage area. Cheers Darius

Now you’re making me thirsty!

The odd Guinness on the workbench is OK, though!

Or indeed when browsing eBay!

This is a perfect example of why you should not consume large volumes of alcohol when modelling.

Many thanks for your kind comments! On this layout with a viewing angle across the tracks, I suspect the gauge difference wouldn’t be so obvious. But having to build my own track enables me to choose finer rail profiles, more natural turnout geometry etc, and it all helps. The gauge is more obvious looking along the layout - this is the view from the fiddle yard, which is a similar view to most of the prototype photos I have of this location:

What the actual f*** is that abomination?