WIP Sunday(?) - Railway Working Weekend

We have had a lot of finished objects over the past couple of weeks, so let us mix it up with a WIP. This is not your normal work in progress, but is a little update on the model railway Llyn Fach. As many railway modellers know, a railway is never finished, so don't expect this to become a FO any time soon! ;)

For quite a while, not much work at all has happened on the Llyn Fach, and that is largely due to life getting in the way. The Llyn Fach is a small model railway that my Dad and I are building and have been for as long as I can possibly remember. Recently my Dad came to visit for the weekend and we had a great time planning some things out and getting on with building some scenery for our beloved little railway.

I trawled back through some of my old photos and managed to find some from when I last did any work on the railway. To give you an idea of where we started at the beginning of the weekend. The layout is very bare and there isn't a clear idea of what we want to happen. But we do have a mostly working track. There might be a few dodgy track joints that need to be sorted before ballasting happens, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

So when we started on this working party weekend, we had a bridge, a cardboard cut out of a platform and a plastic engine shed that was just placed around as something to look at. Our first port of call was to draw up some ideas as to what buildings we wanted and where. We decided to concentrate our efforts on the left hand corner with the bridge and the main station. This is where we started thinking of our station building and engine shed, and I got a crash course in scratch building buildings from cardboard.

Dad used his delightful drawing skills to create some lovely sketches of what our plan was and we set to work. We had a plan to make a lift out section along the top of the corner tunnel, as I had to cut that bit out to relay some of the track. So we came up with a removable grassy section. I had some foam left over from my old work tool box that made an excellent base for that, along with a retaining wall and a paved road and car park made from a leftover piece of wet and dry! - Terrible for tyre wear. ;)

That corner was most of the first days work, as well as a little tool/brake van for our wagon rolling stock, which would have received a lick of paint if we had the colours that the wagons were originally painted in. That was the result of our confusion as to where the paint had even ended up in the first place.

The second day, a start was made on buildings. We had a lovely morning of drinking tea and building things in our pyjamas. The station building started to come into existence, and I made a water column - my first ever scratch build! - It still needs finishing off, with some pipes and some water, but I need to have a good think about how to do that one.

Road with removable section.

The new brake van.

Station building in progress.

Arty action shot, water column visible.

 Overall I think we both had a lovely weekend, it was nice and relaxing, and we got a lot of things done. Railway modelling is something we have both done together for a very long time. All photos of the railway after our weekend are courtesy of Dad and hopefully there will be another update before too long.