Dave

You seem to be making excellent progress! It is good to see. Keep it up

Well Roy, that only makes me feel fractionally better about a four hour journey on an Indian motorway! At least I won't be driving Anyway, just a quick note to say I'll be offline for a couple of weeks at least and I might not be able to be online again before Christmas. So if I'm not, I'd like to be one of the first to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and I hope everyone has fun with their model trains, even in the winter months!

They should be fine outside, but are likely to benefit from a decent varnish! Your structure looks really solid so far! Can we assume that planning permission for the sunny side was granted, then?

Yeah, true. But its not like I'll be spending time over there when I could be playing with my outdoor railway at home!

Welcome to the forum, Patrick Always nice to hear of another outdoor railway! What will you be running on your railway when it is built? Like Mick says, I don't think it matters too much whether your layout is in permanent sun or shadow. You'll need to make some small difference to account for your choice, but I don't think there is anything stopping you with either location, so go with the area you prefer. Personally, I think I'd be greedy and try and use both - but I guess that depends how much say you have over your back garden! Good to have your aboard, and keep us all informed about how it goes, please! Dave.

I don't know about more or less expensive, but like ba14eagle says, it was the one I wanted Dad bought it me for my birthday about 18 months ago - I think it was about £100 at the time. It is "DCC ready" but not enabled, but most importantly it is the rail speed record version of The Mallard. I've still over the moon with the loco. Runs like a dream, she has pulled eight coaches without effort for me and more than that she just looks superb on my layout. What more could I want?

Unfortunately not. Apparantly we get assigned a driver for the duration of the visit, so I expect I'll just be doing some touristy stuff over the weekend I'll be there. The rest of the time will be working. I shall need to pick up some elephant-themes trinkets for our mothers for Christmas and some little bits for the kids. But I don't expect to be able to seek out a model rail shop or have time to travel to one of the excellent narrow gauge railways over there.

Inspired by Mick's personal journal, i thought I'd add my own - please feel free to ignore this at will, everyone! Been a hell of a week at work as I've been asked to travel to India for the first two weeks of December, and needless to say I don't have a visa and my jabs are certainly not up to date. Well, at least they weren't. Jabs I had this morning and I've submitted a visa application. Not really the best time of year to be travelling so far away, but I'm started to get excited about the idea of going. Should be interesting, but I'm going to miss my toys at home!

I wouldn't use as strong a word as hate, but other than that, I pretty much feel similar about both real smoke in a OO loco and the rather hamfisted attempts at trying to make models look real. I find smoke that runs out really quickly more annoying that no smoke at all and then there are all of the other issues that Mick and ba14eagle have already mentioned. One of the things I love about this hobby is the fact that I am actually playing with scale models - not the real thing - that is a different and much more expensive hobby! Unless you are explicitly trying to make your own pictures of a layout look real, the kind of ham-fisted airbrushing just looks a bit silly, IMO This stuff can be good. There is a chap who calls himself Arkurion who I follow on Deviant Art who does really nice picture of Warhammer 40,000 models embedded into in semi-realistic settings http://arkurion.deviantart.com/gallery/ Definately puts a bit of fake smoke to shame! Anyway, I'd better stop before I start properly ranting YMMV.

Well, since I have a picture of the Mallard in my avatar photo, I can claim to be rather fond of A4s. They do have a certain romance to them, but they are definately mainline locos. I don't think I'd try and run one on a branchline layout without a particularly contrived excuse (we never do that, do we? ). But as someone who is rather fond of LNER, an A4 - especially The Mallard - was the second loco I had to have, after the Flying Scotsman.

I had a similar sounding problem with my Hornby Flying Scotsman just after I'd build my layout. When I took it apart to have a look, little polystyrene beads from the box it came in (which I was still using for storage) had found their way inside the gearing and the motor. Once I had spent some time with a pair of fine tweezers and added a touch of lubrication to the necessary parts (the beads had soaked up a lot of oil) it runs like a dream once more. Needless to say, its now wrapped in tissue paper before going back in that box and long term I'm looking for a different way to store the loco.

The delivery charges are quite high - I assume you're looking at 8'x4' sheets? It was less of a problem for me as my nearest Wickes is 39 miles away anyway and I did order 5 sheets and a whole load of 2"x1" batons (or whatever it was in mm), because I used the same for mkaing shelves and brackets for the garage.

I had the same problem as I ordered my plywood from Wickes. I went with the 12mm exterior grade in the end, as the amount of load I'll be putting on the ply with a OO railway is not going to amount to a structural weight and all of my use of ply is as the top surface which is all covered over with felt anyway. Most of my concern was about moisture attacking from below. I've not seen any evidence of this yet, but its only be up a couple of months. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if I made the right choice!

That figure does look really good and complements the loco nicely Interestingly, I wasn't thinking of adding any figures to locos or carriages at the moment. i was mostly thinking of platform passangers and some livestock for my cattle dock. I shall paint them in the same way as I do for my wargaming figures, which holds up pretty well outside (having accidentally left some wargaming figures in the garden for a few weeks in bad weather, a couple of years ago!). I paint these with acrylics paints. Then when done, I seal with a heavy gloss polyurethene varnish. Then I top this off with Dullcote Lacquer, which removes the shine but it still very hardwearing. I don't normally paint eyes of 1/72 figures for wargaming, but I was thinking I would for my railway. Also, the intricate painting I refered to, that I did at the weekend, was a tartan - so I feel I've got to have an old lady in a tartan skirt, or perhaps some Scottish soldiers, somewhere in my scenery.

Only on a model rail forum would I start a topic entitled "People" and think the Scenery board was the right place for it! Anyway, for those of you that have model people on your layout(s) - do you buy them in pre-painted, or paint your own? I'm planning on painting some of my own, and buying in just a few pre-paints, and painting people is one of the things that I shall be doing over the winter. In fact, I've already started on a few Dapol railway workers. If you do paint your own, do you worry about how much detail to paint on them, or are they just really part of the blur of scenery as the real point of interest - the train - thunders past? I did some intricate painting in a challenge this weekend and it made me start thinking about how I might paint some passengers to go on the platforms.