Flickr Galleries and The Avontuur Railway

Recently Flickr introduced galleries which they describe as "a way to curate up to 18 public photos or videos of your fellow members into one place". There is a limit of 18 photos, and you can't include any of your own photos, but they allow you to write a reason why you chose each photo and an overall description. Flickr has some good photos for modelling inspiration and I think galleries could be a good tool for collecting them for projects. I've also recently be looking at pictures of the South African narrow gauge lines so I decided to put some rather nice photos of the Avontuur Railway into a gallery. The Avontuur Railway was 177 miles long and ran from Port Elizabeth to Avontuur. The tourist Apple Express runs from Port Elizabeth but many of the stations, including the terminus at Avontuur are now closed. To see what Avontuur looks like now take a look at these recent photos posted on RMWeb.

I've also been watching more YouTube videos recently. Here are two that I found and watched with my daughter tonight.

A Class 91 crosses Van Staden's Bridge:


An NG15 leaving Port Elizabeth:

Flickr Groups

As a follow up to my recent post here's some more Flickr goodness. Here's some more inspirational Flickr pools but this time there are no pictures of trains. Plenty of pictures to inspire sceneary and weathering though.


Picture by just.Luc licensed under CC by-nc-sa 2.0

The groups:

Tracks Without Trains
Weathered Wood
Any Derelict Building
Rural Decay
Urban and Rural Decay UK
Urban Decay
Walls only Walls!

The Welsh Highland Railway on Flickr

I was browsing the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railways photo pool on Flickr and found some great photos taken by Flickr user mattbuck4950. They are all licensed under Attribution-Share Alike Attribution-Share Alike which means I can reproduce them here. Here are some of my favorites of Castell Caernarfon at Caernarfon station. I particularly like the angles these photos were taken from. The first few are taken at the sort of elevation which model railways are often viewed from and the final picture higlights the bulk of the Funkey against the wall.









The last photo has got me imagining an O14 micro shelf layout, not much more than a senic display stand, with a model of Castell Caernarfon or one of the Garratts sitting on it. I can only dream of being able to afford a O14 Garratt or having the skill, time and patience to scratch build an O14 Funkey that I would be happy with! I'll keep focused on 4mm scale for now.