Well here we are again - Wednesday morning, and another Chuffer-duffers meeting come and gone.
We met at Charles house last night, where we take a welcome break from the never-ending trials and tribulations of railway modelling and have a pleasant evening socialising instead...

I forgot to take my camera, forgot to have a pen in my pocket, and only remembered at the last minute to change out of my slippers before leaving the house. If only I could remember how to worry about losing my whatever it's called - but there you go, it's all part of growing old!

So - no camera, so no picture of the excellent spread provided for us all by Charles' wife. A very tasty home-made pate and salad, washed down with beers by Charles and myself, and a copious quantity of red wine consumed by the other two reprobates.
Suffice to say we all enjoyed ourselves!

On to more important stuff.
The directors of the Teifi Gorge Railway Company felt that the small 5 ton manual crane at Forest Quarry was not really up to the work required of it, so they offered it at a knock-down price to the St Dogmaels saw-mill, and commissioned The Herrington Light Industrial Locomotive Company to manufacture a more substantial steam driven crane to take the place of the aforementioned manual one.
This new state of the art piece of machinery was duly delivered last night, and by this morning was up and running.

Several photographs of this mechanical marvel in operation can be seen below:

Later on in the morning the work started in earnest, with no less than three of the TGR locomotives pressed into duty:

 

 On to other matters, panic has now set in, as our good friend Pete Towns (who serves exceedingly good cakes at Login Station at weekends) asked me would it be possible for him to have the Login layout for September the 30th... Yes of course, I glibly replied (no f'kin way! gasped my inner voice...) However, I figured if I knuckled down it could be halfway presentable.

Watch this space.

Colins next week. See you all then.

'The Duffers have a grand day out'
Well, two of them did, anyway...
The Welsh Highland Railway were having an exhibition and Gala day up at Dinas Station near Caernarfon over the weekend, so Colin and I got permission from the domestic authorities and took off for the day.
Grand weather, and a good run up to North Wales. Breakfast at the Festiniog Station Cafe in Porthmadoc, and then on to Dinas. Around a dozen model layouts, mostly in 009 gauge, a large 0 gauge live steam, and an amazing live steam 009 demonstation and layout. Heres the layout, closed and open:

 Next to it is the small demo layout:

The tiny boilers are fired by an ethanol burner, and the locos given a hand nudge to overcome inertia, and off they go! no speed control, but the amount of load seems to act as a slowing function.


Outside there were free footplate rides on a selection of narrow gauge locos from the Welsh Highland stable and the Festiniog. Couple of examples below:

On our way home we went via Tywyn and called in at the Tal-y-llyn station for a cup of tea and a snack and a quick look around their museum.
Fortunately for us the famous 'Dolgoch' engine was in steam, and about to leave with a train for the last run to Abergynolwen. Here she is powering up and leaving the station:

And off home!


On the modelling front, I found an old picture of a steam crane that was operating at Forest Quarry (part of our Teifi Gorge Layout)

I idly suggested to Colin when we met at the Cardi-Bach Society meeting that it would make a good model... it doesn't take much to start him off...

He produced this to show me when we were out on saturday:

Looking forward to tonights meeting to see what else he has done!!

Best to everybody - Chuffer 1 

Hi everybody. I'm not very good at keeping this up to date am I. Friday already.


Three of us met at Colins on Tuesday, Charles couldn't be with us as he was feeling under the weather - he's going to miss next week too, as it's a Cardi-Bach Society meeting instead of ChufferDuffers, but we wont have Patrick either, as he is shrugging off all responsibilities and swanning off to Ireland...


Anyway - last Tuesday. All centered around Colin really - I had a controller that wouldn't control, and I didn't know why, so Colin attempted to fix it. No quick fix... He is going to try and get it ready for the next exhibition. Bronwydd Village Hall on October 8th, it's the Carmarthen '0' gauge Societys show, and we have been invited to exhibit, even though we are 009 rather than 0.
With that coming up the Teifi Gorge loco stable is undergoing a clean-up, as they picked up quite a bit of dust and detritus from the six hours of operation the other day at Llwyncelyn Exhibition.


Mentioning gauges, Colin has yet another light hiding under his bushel (should be a Tun really, the amount of talent that is hidden)... He has been quietly beavering away at an N gauge layout, and I managed to get off a couple of pictures of it. We are trying to persuade him to exhibit when it's completed.

Practically everything you see has been scratch built, from card, paper, plastic... the tree foliage is bits of scouring pad, real coal in the coal bunker...
The roof lifts off the signal box down in the bottom left corner, and the picture below shows the interior. I put a Bic pen in front to give an idea of the scale:

We finished the evening in the time honoured fashion - wine, pizzas, sausage rolls and crisps (me on non-alcoholic lager as I had to drive home - roll on the next meeting at Llechryd...)

Thats all folks, more in a couple of weeks.