Kremona Coco Tenor Ukulele Review

Railex 2014

Photo: Buckminster Ironstone, seen from the staging/fiddle yard end taken at the little layout's outing to Railex over the weekend. The loco, which was a visitor courtesy of Paul Marshall Potter, is a tweeked Hornby Sentinel. These inexpensive and very useful small engines are great runners. You can 'Like' Paul's Facebook Toy Chuffer page here. . Click photo to enlarge.

This weekend was Buckminster Ironstone's first outing. The show of choice being Railex in Aylesbury - a superb and fabulous showcase of some of the best modelling.

The tiny layout only has one point, so visual interest was enhanced with actual loading of wagons. Real crushed ironstone was considered, however it tends to produce are large amount of dust as well and clogging up the hopper. A workable alternative was chosen in the form of fine sand, which had been sprayed with a little red primer to give it a reddish hue. This flowed well through the hopper, and with the inevitable spillage, there was the risk that it would get in to locomotive mechanisms, but I was prepared to take the risk, which in the event was not a problem. The sand was washed prior, this might have removed any elements such as salt or mud which could make sand grains stick to loco wheels and maybe work up in to mechanisms.

Finally, I must thank Graham Muspratt for giving up his Saturday to play trains, and for Paul Marshall Potter for giving me several well needed breaks on the Sunday

Disclaimer for precious or nervous types; If you want to mix sand and toy trains; don't take my word for it - run a test if you want to try this out for yourself.

Photo: fine sand caught in action dropping into a hopper wagon. Click photo to enlarge.

A New Year, a New Scale...

I finally managed to extract myself from the holiday spirit of putting things off to erect the next project.

Taken with a bit of light through the window and a bit of Photoshop to hide the houses on the other side of the road seen through the window; here we have Scotswood Road which was originally built by Ian Futers the well known serial layout builder. My job is to tidy up this elderly O gauge layout which I believe dates from the 1980's by using current scenic techniques, textures and colouring etc. When complete the layout will be heading for Scotland to be used at home by its owner as well as appearing at various exhibitions.

Scotswood Road, which will have a new name in due course will be serialised in Model Rail magazine as my next major project.