This Month in British Railway Modelling; On The Beach

I suppose it was inevitable that the Summer of Colourful Stuff for BRM should result in modelling a beach! 

Asked to model a gravel/shingle beach, using some supplied sand and gravel packs, I turned for inspiration to a favourite spot in West Wales, Criccieth...

This place is about perfect for a railway modeller needing a seaside location; trains actually running pretty much along the shoreline. The railway passes the shingle to the south, then a bit of headland with rockpools, then behind the more formal promenade and sand.

There's always a lot of interesting stuff washed up on the shingle, it being a wrecking-coast with the direction the tides roll in. OK it's bad that it's rubbish, but still interesting (in a morbid kind of way) to see what's out there in the sea.

I don't just model kitsch, I photograph the real thing :) Family holiday a few years ago. TBH about the point The Childs were aging-out of being happy chucking a ball around on the beach (as opposed to moping and watching things on their phones). 

If there's a downside to the real place, it's the lack of variety with the trains. Not so long ago there were excursions and regular summer steam, then someone chose the Cambrian route to test the new digital ERTMS signalling system, so it went down to just class 158's and a few upgraded 37's. The 158's are now doomed, in favour of fewer, smaller, class 197's (produced with all the comfort, rideability, and design aesthetic associated with the phrase 'Department of Transport Specification). Still, at least the occasional railtour makes its way up here, when there's a gap in the timetable on this rationalised line.

The project was doing double-duty with an article in the Hornby Collectors Club, so needed to be large enough to serve as a photo plank. That in turn meant it needed to be able to fold-over for storage in a large plastic box, against the day I ever find time to clear-out and organise the workshop.

Groynes from scrap ply and some I-section plasticard.

Papier-Mache, filler, and paint.

A mix of sand and shingle, using things like reptile sand and aquarium gravel alongside the supplied modelling materials.

The set; the promenade space on the end would be getting developed later...

Yellow Train (Wins The Game)

Trying to make it look bigger than it really is.

View from the train.

Very overscale Hornby/Triang track, but then like I said, it was doing double-duty with the Collectors Club.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand in print.

 

Garden Railway Saturday; P.S Models Estate Locomotive

One of Amy's today, though she asked me to final-paint and weather it.  This was another of those impulse purchases at a show (think it was the Barrow Hill exhibition last year), we wanted a 'plonk on the layout and go' kind of loco to just trundle about the layout.

A mixed-media kit, and surprisingly complex for such a small locomotive.

Experimenting as ever, Amy did the base-coats with artists acrylics, marker pens, and the like, no sprays.

The designer has used some ingenuity to hide the motor and batteries on such a small engine too.

The driver is a Bachmann figure, though a little bit too heavy for the loco; it it has a fault, it's that this is such a lightweight loco it's needed a lot of weight adding to make it move without just sitting spinning its wheels.

Paired with the slate-waste wagon from the same manufacturer, which it looks perfect with.

And in print.

A very nice little model, fun to build and paint, and looks good on the layout.

It was also the loco we took to Stoneleigh to the exhibition back in April.

 

Garden Railway Saturday; The Llangollen Show, 2026

Blimey, what a month... some unpleasant personal stuff, and a LOT of model-making. All of which means I'm somewhat late to the finish in posting about the Llangollen Garden Railway show- an event which has become something of a regular go-to for us.

Held in the Eisteddford pavilion, as usual, it's a big garden railway show over two halls, with a mix of layouts and trade.

A few contenders for 'model I'd like to build/own/replicate' starting with these Corris coaches.

The Gauge-1 Deltic was gorgeous. 

And then there's Mavis, my favourite of the Thomas locos. The chaps on this layout are busily making accurate replicas of the cast from the model series, and these machines were very impressive jobs. Amazing what you can do with 3D printing and modern radio-control too.

Mindyou, this live steam GWR 4-4-0 was rather nice.

This caught my eye, though mainly because I saw the real preserved one at the Vale of Rheidol back in the Spring. Apart from being the wrong gauge, it's about half as long as our whole layout.

An impressive, mainly Isle of Man lineup.

Some nice details- there were some nice scenic models at the show, and modules with good buildings and scenes on them.

Tram loco.

Thoughts on the exhibition... it seemed a little bit quieter this year. Still busy, but maybe not as much as previous years. I've read a few modellers posting on blogs that exhibitions have been quieter with the rise in the costs of, well, just about everything. Llangollen is one you really need to drive to, so maybe that had an impact. The mix of layouts was ok, but felt like it was missing an attention-grabber as you walked in (the slightly manic, colourful Playmobil layout not being there this year). Usual nice mix of trade, everything from relatively cheap laser-cut (though not as many as usual?) to super expensive live steam locomotives. Refreshments were interesting this year too, no petrol-burgers from the internal canteen, instead a horsebox coffee shop outside, and a similar mobile stand. Very nice, but struggling with the footfall so long queues in the rain. Actually on that note, the first visit we've done which wasn't a heat wave..

As per usual, we walked into Llangollen for lunch. Which was a touch disappointing (very tasty, but not a lot of it), though the ice cream from the shop in town made up for it.

Llangollen Station.

Overall? It was still a nice day out; we had a meeting with both one of our Editors, and with a supplier we might be doing a bit of a collaborative project with. Had it not been for those though, we might not have gone along (50 quids worth of Liquid Dinosaur to get there and back, on top of the entry tickets). We did buy some decent swag there though, plenty of bits for future projects, but it does make me wonder if we'll go back again for next year, or skip a year. 

 

Railway Research Trip; The Tanfield Railway

Last May saw us ticking another new (to us) railway off the list, with a visit to Tanfield, in the North-East. This has been on the to-do list for quite some time, and we nearly went last October.

Boy, sure glad we waited until the weather had improved in the Spring, much nicer...

About the best you could say about the conditions were that it made for atmospheric photographs. 

The railway, however, was excellent. More than lived up to expectations based on what I'd read in the mags and online. This is another of the giants of the British railway scene, even if it hasn't got the massive express engines and the like. It's just gloriously, fantastically, doing its own thing. The railway celebrates the industrial past of the North-East and does it in style, vintage coaches, small tank engines and diesel shunters, and some very quirky stations.

"Twizzel", which might have skyrocketed up towards the top of my list of favourite locomotives. Cute name, and it just looks, well, 'right' as a machine.

Only the week before this I'd been wearing shorts in a mini-heatwave, back in Wales. This day, we actually ended up in gloves at one point, and had to get hot drinks at each station.

This was the sort of thing I was here to see; vintage coaching stock and small locomotives. There's a project coming up for British Railway Modelling, see...

Plenty of chances for detail shots, both outside the coaches...

...and inside. Great place to have a small but heated family argument with the Childs. Ask me how I know.

Anyway, ruffled feathers smoothed with copious amounts of glowering silence, hot drinks, and pastry goods, it was time to stroll over to the engine sheds at Marley Hill. This beautiful little Armstrong shunter, a real dinosaur of a loco, was pottering about.

Moody shot.

Andrew-Barclay taking on water.

Lots of opportunities for cameo shots around the place.

Back to the sheds.

Love an Austerity, and the NCB-liveried no.49 was looking smashing.

A very characterful station at Andrews House; this will be inspiring a Hornby piece as well in due course.

Back onto the train for a run to the other end of the line.

"Twizzel" again on the mixed train.

This was the best part of the day for me. I've been doing a lot of research for the upcoming projects, a chunk of which has been the industrial railway photography books curated by Gordon Edgar. By dint of young age I missed the dying-days of industrial steam railways, but the Tanfield manages to replicate some of the grot and grime. Getting a chance to shoot moody pictures like this was terrific.

If there was a downside to the day (beyond the domestics... though is it a domestic if you have the row outside of the house?) it was the distance away. I could have easily spent another few hours here, but it's a long run back to West Yorkshire, especially in the awful weather, so we thought we better hit the motorway.

Still- characterful railway, amazing locomotives and stock, beautiful countryside, friendly volunteers; we'll be back for more later in the year with a bit of luck. In the meantime, plenty of inspiration for at least two upcoming projects...