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.

Wedding Wasitcoats

This I think is the first project which I have done which has had a proper deadline. Those of you have been over to my youtube channel and have seen the Blog Round Up video, you will have seen these waistcoats being made and they were for my Mam's wedding.

The theme for the wedding was purple, and we had decided it would be great to have purple waistcoats, but we were sure we couldn't find what we wanted in the shops. So Mam got out an old pattern for a waistcoat that she had used years ago, and we made one waistcoat to see how it went.

The outcome was good, Mam loved it and suddenly I had four more to make. The waistcoats were for Me and Emma (we were firing the wedding train as it was on the Talyllyn Railway) and then another three. One each for my two brothers and then one for Mr M, all who had roles to play on the day.

I did learn a lot, having to make them all in different sizes. This was also the first time I had properly sewn something for someone to wear. I had once sewn myself a basic skirt, but this was a whole new ball game.

Luckily they all came out pretty well, and we had a great day.

The Happy Couple and Children

The Firemen

Llyn Fach

For a long time I have had a 009 gauge model railway. It is small enough to fit inside a cabinet bookcase, and I used to spend time working on it with my Dad. The past few years the railway has sat inside the bookcase, looking half finished and a little bit sorry for itself.

The railway has a little engine, its a generic saddle tank, and is named Sam, (after Peter Sam in the Rev. Awdry books), Sam also has a few coaches and a couple of trucks, that are shunted here and there around the few sidings.

Loading Gauge Issues

 A couple of years ago, I'd got the layout out and identified where some track needed replacing. Namely around the left side corner, where there was a slight track gauging issue... Some of the little plastic clips which hold in the rail had snapped and the engine would often derail there. I had bought a new length of track to fit there, but that too had been sitting in a box in the corner of the room waiting to be fitted. So I finally decided that I was actually going to do it. And I did.

I got out the layout and set up the controller to see if I could reassess the problem. What I found, instead of having track slightly wider than It should have been, was that actually we had a slight loading gauge issue around the road bridge. In my experience vehicles hitting bridges is never good. So I was faced with two options: move the bridge, OR move the track. Seeing as the bridge scenery was partially done, and I was going to replace the track anyway, I started going about replacing track.

The track around the bridge was also interesting. There is a station just before the bridge, loosely modeled on Wharf Station at the Talyllyn Railway, and so there is a platform and just before a loop. At some point there has been some bodging of track work when the loop was put in, and we were left with a rather untidy few sections of track leading out of the loop and under the bridge. The first of which seemed to be causing problems before.

Untidy Track

My plan,with the length of track I had, was to replace the entire curve up to the loop point, including the little messy piece. This is what I set about doing, pulling the track pins out, and saving the serviceable ones, and just chucking the old bent ones that weren't of any use. There was only one problem I came across, and that was that most of the corner is covered by the road across the top of the bridge...

Ultimately the only thing I could do was to take a knife to the cardboard bridge to get it out of the way. I had devised a way to cut up the bridge so that there was minimal damage.

I cut the bridge along the rear road boundary and completely lifted the back piece out, which gave just enough access to get in and remove the track, as well as lay the new piece.

Taking the two old pieces of track out was an interesting experience, as the track practically fell apart as soon as the track pins were out and it was slid out of the fishplates. I was rather glad I was replacing it.

The bridge coming off

Once the track was in and pinned down, and the bridge loading gauge issue was sorted, I slowly ran the engine around the curve to see how it ran. Unfortunately it did brush up against the wall at part of the curve, but that was solved by cutting out a section of the cardboard wall. The hole cut out is below the line of the top of the bridge, and will also allow some extra access to the curve once the bridge goes back on.

I was pleased with the curve once it had been relayed. The loading gauge problems were solved, and the curve looks a lot better, hopefully the engine will also run nicely too!

Done!

Holidays...

I am very sorry for the lack of posting in the past three weeks. I had got romantic ideas that when I went to Wales for two weeks I would be able to finish loads of projects, revise for my upcoming exams, and manage to fit it all in around working on the Talyllyn Railway.

Obviously none of that actually happened. I worked on the railway most days, did minimal revision and hardly any making. But we'll try and get back on top of all of that.

I did start another scarf just like the one I did before (Striped Scarf). I made this one with the left over wool I had from the one the Mr M asked me to make. Whilst I'm not a football person, it did just happen to be the colours of the Welsh Rugby Union team! The pattern for which I've now put up on Ravelry so you can download it as a free PDF pattern here, but you can always refer back to the original post on the blog here for how to do the fiddly bits.

Sadly the lovely leg warmers that I promised are still a work in progress, but they will be up soon! I did take them to wales with me, but about two rounds were knitted of them... I know I need to get a move on.

The polka dot knickers also have not made any more progress, I didn't really feel up to taking my sewing machine with me.

In other news I have started bullet journaling.  There is a lot of cool things going on with bullet journaling and it has become really really popular over in the states, but going back and looking at the original website, it is actually a really useful tool when used properly, to help people organise themselves, but also be able to become more productive by writing down thoughts, and things that need to be done. Once those things have been written down the brain isn't struggling to remember everything that needs to be done, giving you a chance to properly focus on the task in hand.
There is a really interesting post about it here, it also mentions attention deficit traits, and gives a fair bit of food for thought.

There is also a section on that website for getting started. One of the lovely things about it, is that you can be as creative or as minimal as you like. You can use whatever you have around you to get started, you just need a notebook and a pen. I've just got a notebook I picked up from the doctor who experience in Cardiff, and a load of coloured pens. What you make of the journal is completely your own, and sometimes beautiful things can come out of it.

Carriage Brake Maintenance

This weekend the factory of things had taken a break from making, and went to Wales for some fixing!

This weekend I have been fitting new break blocks and adjusting the breaks and triple valves on the Talyllyn Railway, the world's first preserved railway. This is the railway that I do the most of my volunteering on, as is well worth a visit, to ride on or watch the little trains trundle their way up the valley!