Simon Wood

Merry Christmas from the Moel Rhos

Merry Christmas everyone – and here’s to a trainful happy new year in 2025!

Train shelves

In the summer of 2020 I knocked a hole for the railway to enter the shed to provide storage for keeping trains coupled up and on the rails to get things going more quickly when I wanted to run something. My intention was to create a ‘fiddle yard’ based on the ‘cassette’ system often used in smaller scales, but owing to space 16mm scale takes (and the fact my converted pig sty is not a big shed!) I decided to have the cassettes stored vertically, effectively as a set of shelves.

Making holes…

Back in May and June 2020, lockdown restrictions gave me time to work on the extension, which at that point had only reached as far as the second bridge. The next step (for both phases 2 and 3) of the extension involved making holes including one for gaining access to the shed for stock storage.

Building Bridges (2)

The most delayed post on this blog (so far) I meant to write this 8 years ago, it was a planned 2-parter with Building Bridges (1) describing two alternate styles of removable bridge. The second bridge itself was complete before I’d written up the first!

Doctor Who and the Easter of Doom

The Doctor, being a time traveller, is not out of place on any garden railway in any period… indeed, one of the consequences of time travel is that there may be several of them. After I’d printed a John Hurt I discovered the Eaglemoss figurines are 1/21 scale and I picked up a few as they are pretty close to 1/19 scale.

Easter Bunny

A couple of Easters back I realised the line had no Easter Bunny (not counting the scale 4 meter high monsters who visit occasionally) so I downloaded a rabbit from Thingiverse and printed him. Here he is riding in luxury on a Binnie flat wagon…

Sir John Hurt

“Great men are forged in fire. It is the privilege of lesser men to light the flame.”
– The Day of the Doctor

One of the first things I did when I got my printer, back at the end of 2020, was of course to download Sir John Hurt and print him at 1:19 scale.

Priming Prints

Having made a start in 3D printing I found that priming some of the bits and pieces I’d testing with different print settings helps to show up differences in the finish you get.

Hot Cross Bun train

It’s Good Friday! But owing to engineering work, the hot cross bun train may not run this year, so… here’s a video from 2020 of this vital service.

Lights

A couple of weeks back I posted a photo from a late night steam running session which took place back in May 2020. The top photo on this post is taken half an hour later the same evening. By this point it was pretty dark, and you can see to good effect the illumination provided by the light mounted above the smoke box.