7 1/4" gauge

 Sunday afternoon and over to one of the most original and slightly quirky garden railways. 7.25" gauge and run on car batteries. Section working and signalled.

16mm Garden rail track

From a dismantled 16mm line. 9 points, 3 slips, and 25+ yards of track. Free to pick up.
UPDATE: now gone. Unsurprisingly.

Southern branch

There's not been a lot of modelling going on here in recent weeks, more writing up what I'd already done for the GWR book.

However there has been a little playing with bits. The old Morton Stanley board newly stripped bare and now semi-boxed gave an almost clean slate for a one board wonder (see RM this month for my take on this). Physically it's a mix of yellow code 75 and the new bullhead - i.e. some new points and some scraps, coupled with the newly acquired P and the engine shed built for the narrow gauge book which is still unpainted.

The prototype base for all this is an SR beach branch. I've long been interested in the Newhaven West Quay line and some photos of the P at Kingston Wharf sealed it.  Plus the information that 03s and 04s were used at Kingston giving a possible four loco types to play with and still be prototypical.

A further trip to Rye Harbour a couple of weeks back formed some more visual research (see COD's blog to your right for lots more on this particular area) and some internet digging threw up all sorts of maps and inspiring stuff.

There are questions of course. The feel will be my usual 'light hand on the scenic tiller' with plenty of open space, but I'm undecided abut what to do to block the exit. A water tower seems logical, but is it likely? What I need is something about 3.5" high by about 1.5-2" wide where the box is, but what would be next to the track? The area south of the ruler would gently drop down into estuary mud.

Utility posts

Here's one that's been nagging away at me for a while. At the north east side of Heathfield in Sussex there are a batch of posts made from what looks like bullhead rail. I've never seen these anywhere else. Not until last week when I took a rarely used route to the south on a parallel road toward Battle. Once again a short section of road with similar posts. The second road must be a few miles directly south but unconnected to the first.
The questions are why are they made this way and why here on two roads near to each other, but not connected? Is it rail? And if not, why do it this way and not use the normal posts?

Ex Cambrian open

OK, I've been a bit absent from here for a month. To the point where people were asking about my health, which is sweet. This has understandably knocked the blog hit rate by about half from the usual 10k per month. The truth of the matter is that rather than doing any actual modelling, most of the time has been taken up doing research and final editing for the forthcoming GWR book, the last-to-do physical bit of which is pictured above.

A bit of a weird one. The GWR inherited a number of Cambrian Railways opens which were in the main transferred straight into departmental use. A few of these had the drop sides effectively permanently fixed by adding corner plates. I can only assume that this was to make them more robust and to carry track debris such as rail fixings, busted sleepers and anything else which didn't have the need to be shovelled over the side. Here a few general tweeks and some plastic sheet corner plates alter this Cambrian Kits model.