Garden Railway Saturday; Beeching comes to town...

So, as the blog wheezes back into life; a little update on the garden railway.

This was a 45mm line at the in-laws house, which was built to a budget, and which suffered more delays in construction than HS2. It had to be completely dug-up and lifted, then re-laid, multiple times due to problems with the pipework under the garden needing to be dealt with.

So come Spring 2024, and the aftermath of the winter storms, the railway died for good. The collapse of a fence panel, subsequent tramping of the railway when we tried to fix the fence, and then impending arrival of scaffolding to fix the roof led to us deciding to throw in the towel.

Despite how good the railway had been starting to look, it was taking a lot of work to get trains to run reliably given the track kept getting walked on. It wouldn't survive being lifted and rebuilt yet again, so the decision was taken to scrap the whole damned thing, and sell off almost every train, all the track, and return the garden to being a garden.

This was an issue however, as after over a decade of trying, I'd picked up a regular gig writing for Garden Rail Magazine. Purists might therefore point out that one of the things you need, in order to write monthly for a garden railway modelling magazine, is a garden railway.

Happily, this all coincided with us deciding to move house, and we realised there'd be space for a new line (smaller of course) at the new place, so not all was lost, and it also means I can continue Garden Railway Saturday here on the blog...

Hornby: The Collector. A Trading Estate Railway in 00 Scale

Playing catch-up on old projects, where the blogging got sidelined by the house move. This was a project for Hornby, for the Collectors Club.  I was going through a bit of a layout design phase, re-visiting projects I'd done in the Lockdowns for Railway Modeller, though in a bit more detail and with added model making.

Pensnett, in Dudley, West Mids, is home to a large trading estate of the 'tin shed' variety. Back in the 60's it had an internal railway line, which had been trimmed back to a coal yard/delivery point for bottled water by the time I was growing up in the 1990's. I thought I'd do a re-imagining of it as if the original internal network had survived into the early 1990's.

For real-world inspiration, I turned to the Balm Road Branch of the preserved Middleton Railway in Leeds...

...and the old Workington Docks lines.

All that's left of the original line at Pensnett is the preserved, plinthed shunter (a couple of the other locomotives survive as well elsewhere).

The idea was a simple couple of dioramas, one for a corner of the layout, one for the exchange sidings with British Rail. Scrap materials for the scenics, and for the buildings I planned to use the old Town and Country range Hornby sold in the late 80's/early 90's. This was meant to be a 'moving on from the trainset' type scheme, so I thought I wouldn't modify the buildings too much.

Foamboard scenery, with some packing foam for the landforms.

Ballast was the foam underlay that Hornby used to sell (for environmental reasons, I gather that this is being phased out these days, but I had a load leftover from previous shoots.

The road surfaces and building surrounds were sprayed with textured paint, though in hindsight it was too coarse a texture. Sculpted filler for the other landforms.

Another glamorous photoshoot on the drive...

I was using models effectively straight out of the box; I'd acquired one of the recently-released Ruston 88ds models (to represent the real one once at Pensnett), but couldn't bring myself to repaint the rather nice Rowntrees livery just for this project.

It is, if anything, too nice and modern a model for the lo-fi 90's-era stock and buildings.

Ditto for the Sentinel.

Some properly retro models used for the exchange sidings scenes. An old Class 25...

...and one of the shunters I kit-bashed from the Barclays for the £100 Layout build.

It was a project with a lot of compromises, and I could have done with some buildings on the backscene, so it wasn't quite so flat and open. But it did the job, and planted the idea for a related project for a later article (more on that coming soon).

A trip to an Exhibition; Keighley MRS Show, March 2025

Well, better get back into this blogging malarkey, as I've picked up a new regular gig for another mag. And I gather the industry is all about The Socials and such now.

To be honest winter has been pretty knackering, but that's down to juggling projects with the Day Job and the house move. This was the first exhibition I'd been to in about a year. Usual venue, Harden Garden Centre.

OK this was undoubtedly my favourite layout at the show, though heaven knows I don't need yet another scale to work in.

There seemed to be fewer layouts there compared to prior years, but what was on show was excellent quality, and there was a good buzz about the place on the Saturday morning.

Oh look, the Day Job meets the Side Hustle. In fact, the day before the show I'd been assisting with cardio training and CPR.

I could have spent hours in front of this one; I've seen this layout in mags and online, and it was great to finally see it. So many details, so much movement crammed in- very impressive.

Yellow Land Rover. Family in-joke there.

So, does this mark a return to regular blogging?  Should do; plenty of projects on the go, and we're in the process of setting up a workshop (as opposed to one end of a kitchen table at the old house).

 

The Obligatory 2024 New Years Review

Well, well, well... no updates since May. Though in my defence, I've not stopped working on projects, builds, or stuff for mags; balancing as I was the Three Childs (teenagers now), my increasingly time-consuming day job, some Real Life Drama, and... trying to pack up our house (and a separate workshop) for a move. A somewhat protracted move; we looked at the house in July, and finally moved in at the end of November.

So anyway, every other model-making blog on the planet does a post like this, looking back at a year of work, so I thought I'd jump on that bandwagon too. Partly to remind myself what I've been up to, and partly in case anyone still bothers to look at this blog and see that I have in fact been working.

Starting the year, a shot published in BRM from an old project, the industrial-themed Cakebox layout.

I continued producing work for Hornby, for the Collectors Club.

Things not off to a good start; the garden railway suffered its final catastrophe, when the Spring storms bought down a fence, and a load of plants onto the line. With the need to remove it and replace it for some scaffolding work, I got fed up of the whole damned thing and ripped it up for scrap. Thus ended several years of trying to be a garden-railway modeller.

At least, temporarily, as it turned out.

Gerry Anderson Day saw an attempt to do some pics using some old kits from Captain Scarlet; the original plan for shooting outdoors scuppered by poor weather...

...which also scuppered the shoot for The Collector, which resulted in a hastily-built set on the kitchen table, in the Kitchen-Workshop-Laundry in our little end-of-terrace.

Big props to the designers at Hornby for saving that project on the page, though I'd gone to a lot of trouble with the mocked-up fake website pages, posters, and catalogues, to make up for the poor photoshoot.

So by about a third of the way into the year; the garden railway had been destroyed and scrapped, I'd not been able to undertake any outdoor shoots at home, I was struggling to produce anything in our little house (thus causing a considerable amount of stress within the home and family), and I was close to stopping the whole model-making thing anyway, as I was finding it tricky balancing it with the Day Job.

Funny how a change of scenery can lift the spirits. OK so the weather was often still poor, but there were the odd sunny days which allowed a bit of location shooting, including some non-railway content.

Finally a chance to do the Captain Scarlet shoot I hadn't managed (involving standing in the sea early one morning). Also to indicate how busy a year it's been creatively, if for non-miniature related reasons, this was following two hours of myself and Elder Child batting inflatables around for a photoshoot done for a gallery open call; thank goodness Kitsch is still in fashion, and some of my older projects have come back around in popularity again.

More for Hornby; still struggling with the low-and-no budget shoots, built in a cramped kitchen, one based on Pensnett in the West Midlands. Quite a fitting one, given it was the nearest railway to where I grew up, and this was shortly after my immediate family had moved away to Wales, thus pretty well severing my connection to the West Mids.

An old project which kept on giving; the 0 gauge tinplate, re-shot for British Railway Modelling, who published it at the end of the Summer.

There was another project for Hornby over the summer, closer to home; Damems, on the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway. Well, home for the time being, as at this point the need for a bigger house had finally become so pressing that we'd jumped, and were in the process of moving.

There'd been an interesting development with the garden railway modelling; with the G-gauge line having died a death, me and Amy picked up a regular joint gig with Garden Rail Magazine documenting the build of a new 32mm line. This has seen the production of monthly articles; a good trick considering we didn't have a garden railway at this point.

Mindyou, it did mean a shoot or two up in the mountains in Wales.

Speaking of location shoots up in Wales; some more of the Warhammer stuff as a pallette-cleanser from the otherwise endless railways.

Oh look, there's the Damems one in print...

...and the Garden Railway pieces starting. Of course, a major problem at this point was trying like hell to bank some articles, as the house move was on the horizon (and thanks to some delays, stayed on the horizon for several months longer than intended). What this meant was trying to do a load of model-making back-to-back, at the same time as the Day Job went bonkers again, and whilst trying to pack up the house. Something about burning the candle at both ends comes to mind.

The last Hornby project of the year, but one I was really happy with. Probably too big a project, consisting as it did of three dioramas, effectively a whole model railway layout built on next to no budget and very little time.

So, where am I now? Well, for a start, I'm no longer in Keighley, for the first time in over a decade. I have a workshop (well at the moment its a basement full of boxes) so once the move is properly finished then I'll have loads of space to do work in. There is a plan to restart the comic (he threatens), new art style and sets, because effectively it's my Mindfulness task and calming mechanism. I've still got regular contributions planned for Hornby, we have room for a new garden railway for all these articles we're writing for Garden Rail. During the move I've uncovered box after box of part-built kits and projects, abandoned along the way.

So; busy busy. In a better place (both metaphorically, and literally) than this time last year, at least as far as the model-making is concerned. Raising three teenagers continues to be a bit of a slowly-unfolding car crash, but then that's teenagers for you. Hopefully the model-making will compensate for the other dramas, so I'm hoping to get this all going again on here soon.

In the meantime, happy new year, and bring on 2025.