Garden Rail November 2022

GETTING OUT AND ABOUT TO TEMPTATION Since I last wrote my introduction to an issue, many miles have been travelled to three different shows. Llafair, the Yorkshire show at Elsecar and G3 Autumn event at Flitwick. All excellent days out filled with happy modellers, enjoying talking about their hobby, and watching some cracking trains running. Our larger-than-normal Product News pages show that, as far as new items to empty our wallets are concerned, the manufacturers are working hard. So hard, in fact, that I’ve already started compiling December’s report as there were a couple of late entries we couldn’t squeeze into this month. Don’t forget, a copy of Garden Rail is the perfect answer to the difficult “What do you want for Christmas?” question. Either a subscription (the gift that…

It took me 40 years, but I got there. It was when the first lockdown of 2020 started to drag, that I finally got around to building the railway I’d dreamed about since I was a kid, and, well, I suspect that over the next few years, quite a lot of articles in Garden Rail will start like this, so I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say that my lightbulb moment came on 9th May, 2020, and the #TwitterSteamRally – the day that social media filled up with images of people running live steam in lockdown. And there I was, stuck at home, without even a whiff of steam oil to raise the spirits. If not now, then when? Circumstances could hardly have been better. They could also hardly…

At open days and shows, models of trams kept grabbing my attention for photographs. I had never really considered them as a railway item for my garden, but several of my friends have bought them and I was impressed by how good they looked. Perhaps it was their compact size and the fact you could run them on their own. The Donor My first challenge was to buy one at a reasonable price and then try and convert it to radio control. I also wanted the interior to look normal – as in not full of wires and batteries – and be able to carry passengers. I managed to buy one on eBay for a very reasonable £50. A bargain, and if the radio conversion failed, it was not too…

In Garden Rail 290, I described how I created an imaginary mineral railway, on which I could run my equally-imaginary diesel conversion of a WW1 Baldwin 4-6-0 pannier tank loco. It uses the same layout as my 16mm scale Welsh Highland Railway (WHR), and even some of that lines’ structures. The ‘dieselised’ Baldwin was soon joined by models of real-life weird and wonderful internal combustion locos, which had emerged around the time of WW1, and I had quite a lot of fun building and operating them as an alternative to my strictly-to-prototype WHR stock. There was a bit of a snag, however. The layout is end-to-end, so eventually, all the loaded mineral wagons arrived at the transshipment sidings, while all the empties were back at the quarries. This didn’t bother…

When I started this project, I naively assumed all I had to do was bolt the parts together, and a working model would be the result. It seems there is more to building a working steam engine than that. There is a phrase I’ve read in many model engineering articles - “The chassis was run on air.” A pretty standard part of any build it seems, but not something that I’d ever imagined I would need to do. But I did. Running a locomotive chassis on air is a vital part of the build it turns out. This is how you discover if the valves are set properly, and if all the mechanical parts will actually do their jobs. And it’s easier to find this out before hot steam is…

Date: 13-16 October, 2022 Event: Midlands Model Engineering Exhibition Venue: Warwickshire Event Centre, The Fosse, Radford Semele, Leamington Sp, a CV31 1FE Times: Thursday - Saturday 10.00am - 4.30pm, Sunday 10.00am - 4.00pm Web: www.warwickshireeventcentre.co.uk Date: 29 October, 2022 Event: Exeter Garden Railway Show Venue: The Matford Centre, Matford Park Road, Marsh Barton Ind Estate, Exeter, EX2 8FD Times: 10.30am to 4.30pm Web: www.exetergardenrailwayshow.com Date: 9/10 December, 2022 Event: Steam at Rowington Venue: Rowington Village Hall, Rowington Green, Warwick, CV35 7BU Times: Friday 2pm - 7pm, Saturday 10am-4pm Web: www.johnsuttonmodels.co.uk Date: 11/12 March, 2023 Event: Midlands Garden Rail Show Venue: Warwickshire Event Centre, The Fosse, Radford Semele, Leamington Spa, CV31 1FE Times: 10am to 4pm Web: www.warwickshireeventcentre.co.uk Date: 15 April, 2023 Event: National Garden Railway Show Venue: East of England…