I am always on the look-out for a bargain, so when a Houston Gate Loco Works (HGLW) loco came up for sale on eBay for the princely sum of £25GBP, I snapped it up. One of the things I like about HGLW locos is they come with a form of 4-wheel drive as standard, provided by a simple pulley system (See How I constructed a diesel loco from a HGLW kit). They also have a good quality brass worm-wheel, which tends to give them fairly reliable and smooth running characteristics. As you can see, this loco was provided with a decent amount of ballast in the form of car balance weights.   &nb ..read more

Rationale As you may have read elsewhere on my blog, goods traffic on the PLR is one of my priorities and so I have made sure that I have plenty of plausible lineside industries to provide reasons for loaded freight wagons to travel up and down the line. Although, in real life, there was never a brewery in Beeston, I decided that, with the success of the railway, there would have been a strong likelihood that one would have been built alongside the railway to satisfy the thirsts of the local inhabitants. The goods siding at Beeston Castle station provided the perfect location as the building w ..read more

In Part 1, I described how I added a simple recordable sound module to my double-diesel loco to give it the basic sound effect of a diesel engine in action. However, there was no way of adding a horn sound to this set-up so I decided to add another sound card to the circuitry to provide a horn sound effect. A suitable horn sound was tracked down on the freesound.org website and downloaded. It was then edited in Audacity to tidy up the sound and lengthen the sound of the second horn blast slightly (using the 'Tempo" tool). It was then exported as a WAV file and uploaded to the new soundcard ..read more

In the past I have used a greetings card sound module to provide low coast sound for my IP Engineering plate frame Simplex ( see How I used a greetings card module as a sound card). It was cheap (c£1.50 GBP) but quite limited in scope. The sound file was restricted to around 20 seconds, it had to be recorded via a microphone so the quality was poor and the volume wasn't great. When I saw another recordable module on eBay for a reasonable price (£12.00 GBP), I thought if give it a try, particularly as it was also available on AliExpress for less than £3.00 GBP. They are also available on the ..read more

 Having designed, drawn and printed most of the Southwold Railway goods stock (eg see How I designed and constructed Southwold long wheelbase van, short wheelbase van, two plank open, and four plank open wagons), it was inevitable that I would attempt to design, draw, print and assemble at least one of the Southwold Cleminson six wheeled coaches.   Background information The Southwold was one of the few narrow gauge railways in the UK (apart from the NWNG Railway and the Manx Northern) to use six wheeled coaches using the Cleminson system. 6-wheeled coaches at Southwold S ..read more

When I constructed the new extension for the sand quarry (see How I constructed the sand quarry extension), I decided that the furthermost end of the extension would link back on to the main line as it approached Peckforton Station. I decided that this new junction (bottom left on the above plan) would act as a siding for Peckforton Castle. In my imagined history of the railway, Lord Bentley Tollemache, the owner of Peckforton Castle when the Peckforton Light Railway was constructed, was a great supporter of the new railway and so it seemed inevitable to me that he would have persuaded th ..read more

 I was recently asked if it is possible to edit STL files in TinkerCAD. The answer is yes. It's a bit of a fiddle but once you've done it once, it gets a lot easier. You can remove unwanted parts of an STL file, edit parts of a file independently of the other parts, paste parts of one file into another, move parts of a file around independently of the other parts. By using the following steps - any of the above is achievable STEP 1 - Create a New Design in TinkerCAD Go to the Tinkercad website and if you don't already have one, create an account. Once you have done so you will be taken t ..read more

Chirk station on the Glyn Valley Tramway is around an hour's drive from where I live in Cheshire and so I have visited the site of the railway many times (eg see https://ngruk.blogspot.com/2012/05/glyn-valley-tramway.html ). I love the railway's quirkiness and the fact it had a healthy range of goods traffic for most of its life. I can forgive the fact it wasn't 3 foot gauge as at 2' 4½" it was heading in the right direction from the almost default Welsh narrow gauge of 2'. Source: NGRS Collection After an experiment with designing, 3D printing and constructing rolling stock fo ..read more

 I've just noticed that the last time I updated the blog post about my loco roster was in 2015. A lot has happened since then and so, it's now time to report on progress. Loco No.  1 Name: PECKFORTON Manufacturer: Peckett 0-4-0T Photo:  Date constructed:  2008 Materials used:  Plasticard Chassis:  LGB ToyTrain 0-4-0 Power:  3 x 18650 Li-ion cells Control:  Deltang Rx65b receiver Sound: Phoenix 2k2 Notes:  Constructed from an early Garden Railway Specialists kit. Originally track-powered. Converted to battery power in 2015 ..read more

It does sound counter-intuitive to construct rolling stock for an outdoor railway from cardboard, but cardboard modelling has a long history and, provided the stock is not subjected to prolonged periods of damp, it should survive quite well. The kits currently being sold by Rail-Road Models have been around for several years, being formerly sold by LocoLines. They have a range of models available in both steam and diesel outlines. The kits are available as body shells only or as complete kits with a basic motorised chassis. I opted for their Hunslet loco kit with a chassis which is available ..read more