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).