A happy new year to one and all! I have been continuing to make some headway on several models over the festive period and it has been great to have some time to dedicate to modelling/painting each day. I stripped down a class 33 earlier in this year, which was the Heljan model I brought for a bargain price in BR green/FYE livery for a repaint. The chassis/underframe/bogies have all been weathered and are ready for reassembly. Once reassembled I will be able to add in the Loksound V5XL decoder and add a speaker to the fuel tanks - these are being ordered today. The body shell had a light ..read more

I hope everyone is having a lovely Christmas. We have had a very relaxed Christmas day and I even managed to find some time for modelling, in between the cooking and social engagements! With the layout packed up for Xmas I returned to building some wagon kits and painting with the air brush. Over the course of the next few months I am optimistic I can really get going with the scenery on the layout and I expect this will dominate my modelling time. So before this happens I wanted to build/detail a couple of wagons/coaches and put them in the paint boxes, so they can be slowly painted over the ..read more

The layout I am building has a small dairy siding for the delivery of milk to the railway and I am building a small train of milk tankers for this imaginary facility. I expect I will need somewhere up to 6(?) milk tankers for this train, although building these will be a slow ongoing process. Anyhow, I have finally finished building the first milk tanker from the Slaters kit. This is one of the best model railway wagons I have built, being a superbly designed kit. However, it is quite an involved build and constructing the first one was a bit of a learning curve. I am hoping that the subsequen ..read more

So the layout has been set up all week and I have managed to make some progress with various tasks. I had already ordered the backscenes for the layout, which are a series of foamex boards onto which I will glue the backscene. Last weekend was spent cutting the foamex boards to size and adding in wooden struts to support them. These are all now cut in and yesterday I started gorilla gluing the foamex backscene boards down. The light blue colour is a thin protective film that pulls of the backscene. I have left most of this in place for the time being, as it will protect the surface whilst I un ..read more

Having completed an awful lot of the house redecorating, I have finally had a decent amount of modelling time recently. I have been managing to paint fairly regularly on the weekends and the occasional work day, meaning that some of the wagons and locomotives in the paint boxes are slowly being finished off. The first wagon I have recently completed was the Parkside SR 25T Pill Box brake van in departmental olive green livery. I started building this wagon in Christmas 2014 and finished building it in 2021! The wagon is painted with Railmatch enamels and I used RailTec transfers. These were al ..read more

Over the last couple of months I have had virtually no modelling time, as pretty much all of my time has been taken up between normal work (the 9-5) and redecorating the house. The house redecoration has been a long old project, with every room requiring a complete reworking. We are now 75% of the way through this process and one of the rooms I was allowed to undertake recently was my modelling room. Decorating the railway room next was a strategic move, getting train boxes out of rooms that would soon be coming up to being redecorated, whilst providing me with some space to actually undertake ..read more

So there has been a little more progress with wagon building over the last couple of weeks, with the Herring wagon now finished off. This is the 3D printed Skog kit and I raided a lot of bits from the spares box to finish this one off. It seems to have turned out OK although I am not sure if the endless filing has sorted out the 3D printed lines, the only real negative about the kit. It is heading to the paint shop now and I will wait for a coat of primer to see how it looks. However, I am currently decorating my new railway room, so it will be a few weeks before I can get the air brush up and ..read more

I have managed to make some sporadic progress on building some wagons O gauge in the last few weeks. It is all slow going, but it has been very enjoyable. I have two kits currently on the go and both have presented challenges in different ways. The first of these is a Slaters GWR milk tank. The construction of the chassis is now just about complete. I found this quite fiddly to build and I think the instructions could have been a little clearer. However, the chassis is now rolling freely, although there were a few leaps of faith with the brake gear. I plan to build a rake of these, so the firs ..read more

About a year ago, I finally managed to set up my layout and get some trains running. The layout was only partially constructed (it still is!) and there was no fiddle yard. My Heljan class 03 was being driven around the layout and performing poorly. I presumed I had a fault connection on the track somewhere and headed under the baseboards to have a look, when the locomotive suddenly came to life and drove off the end of the layout, smashing into a hard wooden floor. It was a bit of sobering moment - the chassis skirt and several buffers were cracked/broken, the roof was dented and the locomotiv ..read more

I hope everyone had a fantastic Easter weekend. I have been modelling away on a quite a few projects recently and although I have been making some progress, it all feels a little slow and disjointed. In theory I have more time to model nowadays, although in reality progress is somewhat slower than I would like. I currently have a lot of projects on the go and this scattergun process means that attention is somewhat divided between multiple tasks. I spent Easter Monday modelling away on a few projects and I have decided that I need to finish off a set of these current projects before moving ont ..read more