Loxley Barton Falls

Loxley Barton Falls will be at Brighton Model World Exhibition this year. I have just had the invite paperwork through as a late invite (something about loosing my details!). I see that there are four other 009 layouts at the show which is not bad going for a general modelling exhibition.

Brighton Model World is on the 15th -17th February at the Brighton Centre on Brighton sea front. Apparently they have model ships, life size Daleks, radio controlled things and loads of other modelling stuff as well as railways so it should be entertaining thought the longest event I will have done. Having agreed to attend when invited last year I had not realised that it was the same weekend as the Small and Delightful's Narrow Gauge South West show in Shepton Mallet - a favourite exhibition of mine - though I have not been invited to exhibit yet... (ahem..)

See you at Brighton!

Posted by Simon at 1:42 PM | Permalink

I have had one of Nigel Lawton's Bachmann re-motoring kits for a long time now and one of my engines packed up recently so i set about my first bit of modelling for the first time in a few months. Why does everybody say that the winter is the time for lost of modelling? I never have any time!

Nigel's instructions are very straight forward though the soldering can get a little fiddley (for me anyway!) and in no time at all I had a replacement motor unit ready. then the problems started and to give Nigel his due he did say that removing the worm from the old motor is a potentially worrying aspect. I broke two jewellers screwdrivers getting the worm off. I do realise they were cheap ones and I now have an excuse to get some decent ones, and my thumb will heal eventually. The good thing is that I now have an old shaft which I can use as a drift the next time!

I used the full length of shaft tube provided but as I did not have any thread lock I used super glue which worked fine to start with but after a few problems with clearance in the loco body caused the motor shaft to separate from the worm shaft. I need to go find some thread lock as I can see this happening at the start of an exhibition! on this particular loco the worm is already badly chewed so I might start looking for a replacement chassis anyway as the gears on this one are a bit crunchy. If I do through this chassis away I can reuse the re-motoring kit in another one later!

Posted by Simon at 1:15 PM | Permalink

Posted by Simon at 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My pizza layout has won the competition it was built for - the GDNGRS Pizza layout competition! It was a late decision to have a competition at this years ExpoNG so we kept it to members only. On the day there were five layouts but I know of five others that were underway but not finished in time - hopefully we will see them all one day. We needed an impartial judge for the competition so we asked Carl Arendt who runs the very popular Micro/Small layouts for model railroads website who kindly agreed.

The layouts and Carl's commentary on the Pizza layouts are on the November 15th breaking news section of his website where you can see some of the images we sent to Carl for judging.

I have also added some images on my Flickr site of the Pizza layouts.

Enjoy!

Posted by Simon at 4:23 PM | Permalink

My pizza layout has won the competition it was built for - the GDNGRS Pizza layout competition! It was a late decision to have a competition at this years ExpoNG so we kept it to members only. On the day there were five layouts but I know of five others that were underway but not finished in time - hopefully we will see them all one day. We needed an impartial judge for the competition so we asked Carl Arendt who runs the very popular Micro/Small layouts for model railroads website who kindly agreed.

The layouts and Carl's commentary on the Pizza layouts are on the November 15th breaking news section of his website where you can see some of the images we sent to Carl for judging.

I have also added some images on my Flickr site of the Pizza layouts.

Enjoy!

Posted by Simon at 4:23 PM | Permalink

I was asked last year to exhibit Loxley Barton Falls at the 2007 Norbury & South London Transport Club's exhibition on the 10th and 11th November. I was put in a small alcove next to the gents (quite handy) but this wasn't far off the entrance so nobody missed the layout. I forget how many more families go to general shows than the more specialist narrow gauge shows and it was a bit noisy!

On the first day I had four tentative invites for other exhibitions next year only one of which I have been to before so the layout might get seen a bit more in 2008.

Both my locos with Bachman chassis decided to play dead so I ran the weekend with my new Crochat railcar and a mix of my Stenning Corris 0-4-2 Huges and the little Japanese L class loco which ran superbly! I even built up a rudimentary operating sequence over 5 - 8 minutes of running which I might make a little more complex for its next outing - if I can move some badly placed magnets!

Posted by Simon at 5:02 PM | Permalink

Loxley Barton Falls features in the modelling section of Narrow Gauge World edition 53 September /October 2007 - there is a big grin on my face right now. The photos have come out much better than I dared hope and Cliff has done some close crops - so the hi resolution images were worth sending!

Apparently this has been out since mid August - I only just realised my subscription had finished earlier this year so was not aware of it being published till today...

Posted by Simon at 5:51 PM | Permalink