Our first silverware!
The attendees of the Bridport Model Railway exhibition voted our layout best in show. This is only our fourth public exhibition so it's great to receive some recognition. I've never owned a trophy before!
After a wet Friday evening setup (we've never setup in the rain before!) there were many electrical gremlins - more so than ever before. I'd done extensive work to the fiddle yard to install additional track isolators and four more electric points (as previously mentioned) and unfortunately, even though I documented all the wiring changes, this was the first time that the three rear sections could be connected together. There just isn't room at home to test them all, and along with some track shorts, there were many things that didn't work... and still don't!
Thankfully the issues were confined to the rear of the layout and didn't detract from the running of the four main lines, once again we kept things running all day and many attendees commented on this achievement. People like to see things running and this was my primary goal when I first envisaged the new layout.
No video footage was taken this time, as the basic design of the layout hasn't changed. Just a chance to run my new additions, repaints, re-transfers etc. It's only been two months since the last outing but there was much to test.
After stripping and repainting my Duchess of Atholl, it was very reluctant to move, this one will require further work to find out why. Disappointing as it was a good runner until I took it apart. Deltic St Paddy also refused to move, I suspect a broken wire and will repair shortly.
Regular readers of this blog will be aware of my obsession with double-heading. One of my greatest frustrations to date has been the inability to double-head my two Castle locos. The front bogie has no front coupling, or any space to install one. I've tried several ways to join the two locos together (including chaining them together) with no success. After locating a spare front bogie in the spares box, I dediced to experiment and reamed a portion of the front of the bogie, then drilled a small hole and installed a coupling and rivet from a scrap wagon. After testing the Castles to see which was the fastest of the pair (fastest loco always goes first) I swapped the bogies and the results were really impressive!
The refurbished (with overlays) plank wagons got their first run, and the first time a goods train has appeared on the inner loop. A nice addition to the layout.
The thirty refurbished wagons also made their maiden voyage. A little hard to pull and had to be reduced in length. I'll do some more investigation to see why they were so reluctant to run but those that did run looked really good!
The two recently repainted 0-6-2 tank engines made their first appearance on the shuttle, displacing the previous refurbs. These ran faultlessly all day and were a relatively good power match. They make my first attempts at loco repainting look rather poor in comparison.
Finally, and I make no apologies for the copious amounts of EMU shots, the new, six car (2 x 3 car) SR EMU, after some initial stuttering and hesitation, made a fantastic debut, purring around the layout as it always did but now with more coaches. The rear three cars are not powered, a first for me as I don't like using unpowered dummies but there's ample power in the motor coach and I can't justify the expense of another power car, especially one that's in good condition.
Lots of pictures below, enjoy!
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