I've done away with an opening picture, as the same one appeared on all previous posts each time I changed it.
Instead I'll post an occasional picture with a narrow gauge theme, to inject a bit of interest into the blog. They wont have captions, but I'll identify them in the following post.
For this post we have the following. Obviously French, and now long gone. Any ideas?

At the Hermon show last week, we did have one minor glitch - our commercial locomotive 'Rosie' ran for most of the morning non-stop on the Dyffryn Y Tyllau layout, but for some unknown reason decided to throw in the towel, and refused to go any further:

Colin happened along for the afternoon session, and took Rosie home with him to investigate.


Chufferduffers met at Colins on Tuesday, and I'm now happy to report that after some intensive operations and medical care in the Herrington Hospital for Sickly Steam Engines (pictured below)

Rosie was declared fit and well and able to return to duties. Colin had set up his small branch terminal and was able to give a short demonstration of Rosie's performance.
Here she is push-pulling a short train of Festiniog style coaches.

Whilst at Colins I noticed one of his scratch built locos that I don't think has been seen on the blog.
Sporting rather spiffy name-plates here is 'CNWCE'

With Hermon under our belts, the exhibition circuit is over for 2017, so all the layouts have been stacked away in a corner of the garage, some waiting to go to Peter Towns new shed, which will house the Cardi-Bach museum, and hopefully a permanent home for the associated layouts.
Here they are neatly stored:

Next year we hope to resurrect the 'Teifi Gorge' quarry layout, so to that end I moved all the boxed boards up into the workshop and erected the layout ready for overhaul and additional work at the next Chuffers meeting, hopefully next Tuesday.

Annie, my wife, was not too happy about the appearance of the backscene, so yesterday that was given bit of a makeover. Many thanks, Annie!

Two blog posts in one week... I'm spoiling you.

Hwyl,
Shaun.

COLINS IN PRINT!!

Several weeks ago Colin penned an article on constructing narrow guage locomotives from scratch, and sent it off to the 009 Society Journal - they duly published it in the December edition - not only published it, but put one of Colins photos on the front cover!

 

The picture is a lot clearer than shown here, as this is a photo of a photocopy. Two page article inside with lots more pictures.
Unfortunately the Monthly magazine is only available to members of the 009 Society, but the exquisite little engines can be seen on our Teifi Gorge layout, when we exhibit it at various venues around West Wales. No more this year, regrettably, but this segues cleverly on to the next bit of reporting - The Modeling Exhibition put on by Roger Howells at Hermon last weekend.
Chufferduffers attended with no less than four layouts (three of our own, and the fourth belonging to Emyr)
The line-up on Sunday morning:

Kilgerran (Emyrs) at the far end, with 'Dyffryn Y Tullau' tucked in next it, leading on to 'Crymmych Arms' and ending up with Pat and 'Maes Y Gof'

Here is the line up from the opposite end:

'Kilgerran' was purely static, as Emyr had to be elsewhere during the morning. Once again a lot of local interest was shown in the Cardi-Bach interpretation, particularly Crymych, with a lot of people from the area unaware of the history.
We had to convince audiences that the other two layouts were fictitious...

Here is 'Maes Y Gof' - Caught just at the moment when no train was in sight!



And 'Dyffryn Y Tyllau' having its public debut...

Pat and I were kept quite busy all morning, as Colin was doing organ duty at the church in Cilgerran, but joined us later in the afternoon.
Lots of familiar faces and friends, including Pete, Chris, Howie, Ken, and Tony, amongst others.
An excellent day all round, and thanks go to Roger and Ann for making the show a success.

Lots of superb modeling throughout the venue - too much really to post on here, but one item caught my eye - can you believe that this is a mere 8" long?....

Thats all for this post - I'm sorry to leave such a gap since the last one. I shall have to try harder!

Shaun.