I was pleased with the effect on this photo which was taken during an evening running session in May 2020 at around 9.15pm. The low light forced my phone camera to slow the shutter, and a panned round with the loco to keep it in focus while the background blurred.

https://moelrhos.uk/2024/01/12/late-night-steam/

#16mmngm #GardenRailways

Looking back over the garden railway year, one particular pleasure has been our South West Wales 16mm Association Area group resuming a substantial programme of garden railway visits after lockdown shifted us online in 2020, and while we had some good meetings in 2021/22 it was only this year we got back to monthly (sometimes even twice monthly) gatherings in each others’ gardens.

As I didn’t post here about them at the time, it seems a good opportunity to link to my photos albums from each visit.

Hoffnant Valley Railway April 2023

In April we revisited the Hoffnant Valley Railway, a picturesque line around a lake, featuring two independent running tracks and some steep gradients.

Moel Rhos Nos 1 & 3 attended, with a train of mixed slate and coal wagons. In the accompanying image, No. 3 is hauling a rake of tippers from the Lambak Railway.

See all the photos in the album: Hoffnant Valley Railway April 2023

The Railway in the Valley of the Mill May 2023

In May we visited the Railway in the Valley of the Mill. This was our group’s first full meeting on the line, although I have had the good fortune to visit many times and Moel Rhos stock has run there frequently. It is a steep end to end railway, with multiple passing loops and some impressive line side building and a huge wooden viaduct. Most members’ lines are loops with continuous running, but running end to end provided some challenging – and fun – opportunities to co-ordinate, to make sure no two trains enter a block from opposite ends (perhaps we should use tokens!)

Again, Moel Rhos Nos 1 & 3 attended, with the same train of mixed slate and coal wagons, which can be seen with No 1 in the accompanying photo, in front of the quarry workers’ cottages at Tanygrisiau.

See all the photos in the album: The Railway in the Valley of the Mill May 2023

I also shot a driver’s eye video of The Railway in the Valley of the Mill, on my newly designed and printed camera wagon, which I will describe in a separate post.

Preseli Mountain Railway June 2023

I wasn’t able to make this meeting – so there were no visiting locos from the Moel Rhos and I have no album – although you can see other’s photos on the group’s website.

Shearstream Light Railway June 2023

In June we visited the Shearstream Light Railway. This was both the group’s first gathering there and the first time I had seen it for real – although the I first met railway’s designer, builder and director in the comments section of this blog several years ago! The engineering is hugely impressive, there are two separate loops (on two separate levels) linked so you can run out and back.

Once again, Moel Rhos Nos 1 & 3 attended, with the same train of mixed slate and coal wagons. In the accompanying photo, No 3. is hauling the train on the lower loop.

See all the photos in the album: Shearstream Light Railway June 2023.

I brought the camera wagon along again and took some driver’s eye shots of the Shearstream Light Railway too.

Dyffryn Llynfi & Porthcawl Railway July 2023

Another first for the group in July when we visited the Duffy Llynfi & Porthcawl Railway, a fun and charming line in a small garden, incorporating a terminus and a tight loop for out and back running.

This time, owing to the fact I’d been staying in a hotel the night before, I brought a very short train comprising Moel Rhos’ No. 10 which I had designed and printed over the three weeks prior, particularly so it could fit in a small box along with a rake of Phil Sharples coal wagon. It’s a cabless loco which currently runs on No. 1’s chassis, and I’ll provide a full description in a future post. The accompanying photo reveals that it was only primed, but perhaps we could call it “photographic grey”.

See all the photos in the album: Dyffryn Llynfi & Porthcawl Railway July 2023.

Rhos and Betws Tramway August 2023

In August we returned to the Rhos and Betws tramway, which the groups has visited on many previous, highly enjoyable occasions. This is a large loop, mostly at ground level, running around the perimeter of a mature garden, with a busy and interesting station and a number of line side features including a viaduct across a pond.

The Moel Rhos visiting locos were back to the season regulars Nos 1 & 3 again, with the mixed slate and coal wagons. No 3. is seen on the viaduct in the accompanying photo.

See all the photos in the album: Rhos and Betws Tramway August 2023.

Brockhampton and Umbridge August 2023

Later in August we visited another line we’ve gathered at frequently, the Brockhampton and Umbridge Railway. This intricate line which incorporates a reversing line into a loop and an outdoor terminus as well as one inside the shed. But its standout feature is extraordinarily detailed and realistic model village. We had perhaps our wettest running session of the year, but I think this adds to the atmosphere in the photographs!

Moel Rhos Nos 1 & 3 were again the visiting locos from my line, with the mixed slate and coal wagons. No. 3 is on the level crossing in the accompanying photo, and can also be seen steam through Brockhampton station in the featured image on this post.

See all the photos in the album: Brockhampton and Umbridge August 2023.

I also shot some footage both from the lineside and the camera wagon, resulting in the following three videos.

The first video is a driver’s eye view from a steam hauled train while the second is a driver’s eye video from a diesel hauled train which follows a slightly different route.

The final video is a set of line side views. I added music just to mask some of the line side conversations and to protect the innocent…

It’s been a great year of garden railway visits and I’m looking forward to many more in 2024.

In the meantime, a Happy New Year from Rheilffordd Moel Rhos!

https://moelrhos.uk/2023/12/31/2023-in-garden-railway-visits/

#16mmngm #GardenRailways

No. 5 arrived on the Moel Rhos in April 2020. It’s a Mamod Boulton – a steel-bodied battery-powered diesel outline loco with an MFA motor on an Essel designed chassis.

I wrote at the time:

“I’ve been eyeing up a Boulton for a while – the Moel Rhos needed a heavy battery loco for line clearing. With just one operational battery loco during lockdown (No 1 Gannet) reduced to 2 wheel drive after the belt snapped – the urgency for the new loco increased. What if No 1 had a failure? The consequences would be catastrophic (i.e. locked down and having to wait to get up steam every time I want to play trains).

“I’m delighted with the Boulton which is fully capable of hauling a dead Millie plus train. But it’s not as geared down as I expected and reacts to the sharp curves and even the minimal inclines on my line. If it stalls you can’t just wait for it to brew up like a steamer. Inevitably this occurs in the tunnels or the cutting. I feel it needs to be driven on my line, so RC needed. Fortunately I’d planned to do that anyway and had already ordered a Deltang Rx65c.”

– Virtual Meetup post, 8 May 2020

Fitting the Deltang was a quick job. But I’ve barely done anything else to it since!

I intended to deal with the gearing issue by switching the MFA motor which I believe is 30:1 reduction for one geared at 100:1. But over 3 years later I haven’t got round to that. I also bought a detailing kit from SLR Models which I haven’t fitted yet. I bought it before I got the 3D printer, but there will be plenty of other details for me to draw and print – it really is a nice canvas for adding bits and bobs. I’m not going to go as far as my friend who converted his into a fantastic logging loco, absolutely dripping with details. But it does need a few additions to bring it to life. In the meantime, though, it is proving itself as a very practical loco and while it hasn’t been out visiting it’s seen a lot of use at home on the Moel Rhos. It’s one of the first locos I grab when I’m clearing the line, testing stock, or just want a quick play.

https://moelrhos.uk/2023/12/28/a-mamod-boulton-for-the-moel-rhos/

#16mmngm #GardenRailways #MamodBoulton

No trains running on the Moel Rhos today, unfortunately. But they were, exactly one year ago, last Boxing Day.

Here’s an album of photos from Boxing Day 2022.

https://moelrhos.uk/2023/12/26/boxing-day-2022/

#16mmngm #GardenRailways

Merry Christmas everyone! Dipping into our virtual meet-ups from 2020/21 again, here’s a set of images from Christmas Eve 2020.

I’d used TinkerCAD to laboriously draw a headboard to print especially for the meet-up. I was pleased to find that ABS was unaffected by the heat of the smokebox. Later I would find a much more flexible way to draw headboards in OpenSCAD, I’ll do a post on this in the future, and share my code.

Merry Christmas everyone from Rheilffordd Moel Rhos!

https://moelrhos.uk/2023/12/24/christmas-eve-2020/

#16mmngm #3Dprinting #GardenRailways

Just a little bit of housekeeping for those who follow this blog via social media. I’m dropping X/Twitter but you can follow us in the Fediverse (for example on Mastodon) now.

Since I was last posting regularly the social media landscape has changed considerably. Twitter has been taken over and renamed X, reliability has plummeted, the WordPress automatic posting function blocked, but most importantly moderation rolled back to far it has become the Nazi bar. This will be the last Moel Rhos post on X/Twitter (I’m going to manually post it there). I’ve also stopped using Facebook. I’m not sure if this blog is still auto-posting to Facebook, but if so, when it breaks, that’s it.

So if you want updates to the Moel Rhos blog there are three options, two which have been available for a while.

1. Subscribe by email

Old-school I know, but reliable and pretty universal. Stick your address in the box below and hit subscribe – you’ll get an email whenever there’s a new post.

Subscribe

2. Subscribe by RSS

If you already use an RSS reader (something like Feedly, Newsblur, Inoreader, Netnewswire or Reeder) to keep track of your favourite blogs, you can add Moel Rhos’ RSS feed too.

3. Follow us in the Fediverse

This is the new development – this blog is now on the Fediverse.

What is the Fediverse? A collection of (distributed) social networks where members of one network can follow members of another. Mastodon is perhaps the most well-known software powering these social networks – others include Misskey, Friendica and Firefish. Pixelfed is image-based so if you have an account on a Pixelfed instance you should be able to follow to see any posts here which include an image (which is most of them).

There is also a Moel Rhos video channel on PeerTube which you can follow directly: @moelrhos@peertube.tv.

I am hoping other garden railways will join the Fediverse and I hope in a future post to be able to suggest some accounts you can follow. If you are posting about your garden railway from a Fediverse account, please reply to this post so I can find you!

https://moelrhos.uk/2023/12/21/moel-rhos-in-the-fediverse/

#blogging #Fediverse #GardenRailways

I’m going to try to get back to blogging on here with a new approach.

Apart from the stock boxes post last August (which had actually be sitting in drafts for almost three years) I haven’t posted on here since my last update on Konrad’s cab in August 2018. And while I haven’t actually done much on the cab since then (though I did fit R/C and a whistle) I’ve made lots of progress in other areas, and this is part of the problem: I want to thoroughly document it all chronologically. But I’m never going to get round to doing that, so here’s the new plan…

• I’m going to use this post to give a very brief overview of major changes
• I’ll fill in some of the gaps in future posts
• I’ll post briefly but more often from now on

I’d got stuck on the idea of giving a blow by blow account of major (and minor) developments, setting their significance in context, and generally filling in every detail from the last 5 years. But if I give an overview of changes, that opens the possibility of giving a brief update that relies on those changes for context. So sometimes I might post a single image or video as an update.

I’m also doing to pull in some updates I posted elsewhere, so this blog becomes the most complete account of the development of Moel Rhos and my garden railway modelling activities. Doing a bit of reposting should get me into the habit of posting more frequently too – but apologies if I post stuff you’ve already read over on the Garden Railway forum or our the virtual meet-ups of a couple of our Wales area groups.

Anyway, that just leaves giving the headlines from the last 5 years, which I’m going to break down into three areas: the permanent way, the rolling stock, and the workshop.

The Permanant Way

Two key developments here since I posted about the 3rd tunnel over 5 years ago…

• I reached the shed. Originally described as phase 2 in (gulp) 2016 this incorporates a hybrid form of shelving and cassette fiddleyard which I will describe in a future post.
• I laid the passing loop for a new station. There’s nothing more than trackbed as yet (buildings and landscaping still to do) but this is part of creating a much larger circuit of track (originally conceived as my phase 3)

I’ve also be renewing some of the trackbed of the original loop and extension. My original thinking about trackbed was… let’s say a learning opportunity. More on that later.

Rolling Stock

Quite a lot has happened in this department, so I’m going to confine the major updates here to motive power acquisition. Expect future posts on both freight and passenger stock though.

• No. 5 is a Mamod Boulton. This is a steel-bodied battery powered freelance diesel-outline loco on an Essel-design chassis. I bought this early in lockdown when I panicked about not having functioning rolling stock to play with when stranded at home with my railway (what a terrible waste that would have been). I was able to get one of the last models without sound or radio control, which made it quite a bargain, and I have fitted a Deltang radio control receiver to it. I plan to add details but haven’t got round to any of that yet (yes, I know it’s been over 3 years!) It is a powerful loco easily capable of retrieving my Roundhouse Millie when it runs out of gas.
• No. 6 is model of the Kerr-Stuart diesel 4415. The original was an experimental loco trialled on the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland Railway, I’ve always fancied one, and my model was designed and printed by a friend after I suggested it as prototype. I have assembled the parts, fitted radio control and test run it several times. It’s currently in the process of being painted and finished.
• No 9 is a Regner Paul tram loco. There were several reasons for buying this, the main one being a desire the build Wisbech and Upwell (aka ‘Toby’) style tram loco, and one of these came up second hand at a good price. I don’t actually need another project right now, but I love the running quality of my Regner Konrad and its one drawback is that it won’t self-start because it has only a single cylinder. The Paul has the same ‘Easy-Line’ parts but with twin cylinders it self-starts with no difficulty. For now I’m using it with its original body – although two modifications I hope to make quite soon are swapping the supplied radio control for Deltang, and fitting a whistle.

Sharp-eyed readers will have noted that locos number 7 & 8 are missing from the list… I’ll come to those in the next section.

The Workshop

The main headline here is that I have bought a 3D printer. Well, in fact two. So the workshop has been particularly busy turning out printed models. Initially a lot of these were of 3D drawings from Thingiverse, and then drawings generously shared by members of the Garden Railway forum. But of course alongside these I have been drawing my own, and in the process learning to use to pieces of software in particular: Tinkercad and OpenSCAD. I’ve got much more to write about this, and some drawings to share too, in future posts.

The printers are a Flashforge Adventure 3 which I bought in December 2020, and a Nova3D Whale 2 which I bought in November 2022. This first is a filament printer (or FDM – fused deposition modelling printer) and the second a resin printer. I’m not going to go into to the differences here beyond that resin provides much crisper detail at the cost of producing far more mess and chemical hazards, and I’m having a tough time bending it to my will. More in future posts. I think I have the measure of the filament printer, partly because I chose the same model of printer my friend who printed the Kerr-Stuart 4415 has so I could shamelessly learn from his experience, and maybe because I’ve had it about 3 times as long. (I’ve printed quite a lot of stuff on it!)

Another significant acquisition is a small lathe, that I bought from the estate of an old friend from my old model club in Brighton. But I haven’t used it much yet, other than for centring 3D printed wheels… But it is relevant to the missing locos from the list above: not no. 7 which is simply a set of parts I 3D printed from a drawing of a loco that was shared online (I haven’t assembled them yet…), but no. 8 which is to be a 3D printed live steam loco, designed by the same friend who printed 4415, and is a model of Kerr Stuart’s 4420. This is an odd-looking loco with a water-tube boiler, he has already got his working and he is sharing his drawings with me. I have only got as far as the chassis, but while that and the body are 3D printed, the boiler, gas tank and steam motor will involve metalwork, and that’s where the lathe comes in. I will post updates on my progress with this here too.

So those are what I consider the key developments of the past 5 years. There’s plenty more to write about – including visits to other garden railways, and filling in on the details. But if you’ve read this far (sorry it wasn’t that quick an update after all!) I’m grateful for your perseverance, and if there’s anything you particularly want me to follow up on right now, let me know in the comments!

https://moelrhos.uk/2023/12/20/quick-5-year-update/

#blogging #GardenRailways