Motivation

Recently it seems that every time I some free time to do some modelling there has always been something that I'd rather do, like going for a walk or going to the pub. If I had a rainy Sunday afternoon I'd probably spend it modelling, but if the sun is shining it seems a waste not to be outside enjoying it. I suppose that doesn't matter but it can lead to me getting a bit disheartened by the lack of progress on anything on my to-do list. However I just need to remember that it doesn't matter if I make slower progress than almost everyone whose blog I read, and that there's more to life than model railways. Recently I've enjoyed reading about other modellers doing things like installing church PA systems, building radio control ducks, gardening and finding wildlife in their garden. I wont bore you with any posts about filing and sorting out the house, but I do have some non-model railway projects planned that some of you may be interested in which I might post about.

Welcome...

Welcome to my new blogspot address. I'll be tagging all the narrow gauge stuff I post with NG and all the standard gauge stuff with SG. Anything that isn't gauge specific will be tagged with both so that it will show up in both the SG Feed and the NG feed.

I've been fairly busy at work recently so I've not had much time for modelling. However I have run my new standard gauge locomotives (a Freighliner 57 and Mainline 09) on the dining room table on some set-track and was fairly impressed. On Sunday night I connected up 4 lengths of flexitrack and ran the class 57 up and down it and was very impressed. Even with slightly dirty track and my old Lima controller it ran very nicely. I'm looking forward to seeing what it does with my new gaugemaster controller and some nice clean track!

I'm not going to abandon the narrow gauge either - when I get back from a week away with work I intend to get some more done on my pizza.

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.