Challenge

Here's a quick challenge. What is the building and what is it's connection with narrow gauge railways?

No prizes for the first correct guess I'm afraid!

WHR (Porthmadog)

On our recent holiday in North Wales we visited the WHR(P) which scored 52% on Colin Lea's heritage railway scoring system. The leaflet had said that it would be a diesel operated day but we were pleasantly surprised to discover Gelert in steam. We had a nice (if a little short) ride up to Pen-y-Mount and back, stopping of at Gelert's Farm to explore the sheds and ride on the miniature railway and spot a family of swans. I'd have liked to have seen on of the massive Lyd2 diesels in action or see Russell but he is being restored for 2009 so I expect that this visit wont be my last. There's some more of my photos on flickr.

Pen-y-Mount station got me thinking that it would make a good basis for a model to show off a collection of WHR(P) and WHR(C) stock. I doubt I'll build a model of it as I have too many other ideas and I'm unlikely to have the time to build an accurate model of anywhere so far from home. However it did make me realise something that a lot of the layouts I consider building have in common - junctions.

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World Wide Web

I've had a post in my drafts for quite a while about some things I've found on the internet and some new things which have recently been created. First something fun: a photo of what the WHR might have looked like in the late 70s form the Fictitious Liveries site. Hopefully they will do some more narrow gauge locos.

Tom Dauben has started a new blog for his next project which is called Port na Cailliche. It's going to be set in Scotland on the coast of the West Highlands and should be excellent judging from Dunbracken which is his current layout.

Frank Neubaur's 0 Gauge Homepage which has some excellent Garratts.

I've also been playing about with some google and yahoo web tools. I've created a google custom search which searches shops which searches manufactures and shops which sell narrow gauge models. Hopefully it should appear below, if not here's a link.



I use google reader to keep up to date (ish) with the narrow gauge blogosphere but blogger doesn't put comments in the rss feeds (Wordpress does though). I started playing with yahoo pipes in an attempt to get an aggregated rss feed of the comments on multiple blogs (in an attempt to get something like the Facebook News Feed). It does work but it's not that fast and I've only tried it with 3 blogs so far. I've just subscribing to the rss feed in Google reader and it seems to be working and the speed doesn't seem to be an issue.

I've also signed up to the Narrow Gauge Modelling Online forum which was set up in April. If you've not checked it out yet then take a look. There's some great modelling.