Good afternoon everybody and welcome to the second blog of June.
We are still in our open prison, but we are allowed to wander a short way from home and visit one or two other people...

On Thursday I drove over to Login to visit Peter and Dawn and took some pics and videos of Peter's Lynton and Barnstaple layout. Still in the early stages, but Pete has now got some track laid down and power wired up to it.
I'll post some stuff on that later in the blog.

First of all though is a short video for Pat's wife Mary, who is a bird lover, and was a bit envious when I told her that I could see the baby blue tits being fed outside my kitchen window.

Here they are Mary:

Returning to Login and Peter's Lynton and Barnstaple layout.
This picture below is Lynton Station! Still very much work-in-progress, but an excellent control panel in the foreground-

and if you turn around, things have progressed much further, as the line comes into Woody Bay:

The track has been laid and points powered up from solenoid motors below the baseboard, apart from one on the near right, which has a motor hidden in the shed.

The whole layout is powered and controlled by a Morley 'Vanguard' dual controller, with two walk-about hand controllers. This will be able to operate trains on both sides of the layout.

I was able to film 'Yeo' at work, gently pulling a couple of coaches through Woody Bay station:

(not the actual soundtrack, I have to admit...)

A couple of the buildings for the L & B are shown below - the first is a shot of the goods shed, still being worked on. The vertical battens you see on the side of the building are for fixing hoardings, as demonstrated in the second picture.

That's all from Pete's for the time being - Today I popped over to Cilgerran for coffee with the Brownes, and caught up with what Pat has been doing the past few days. Quite a bit, as it turned out. Probably due to the inclement weather we have experienced over the weekend keeping him indoors.

The hotel that we featured in the last blog or two is now finished:

With the inside exquisitely detailed and illuminated!
Over the shoulder of the gent in the duffle coat just leaving you can peek through the door into the bar.
I tried my best, but my little camera was not quite up to it - believe me, there is a bar, beer pumps, and a bookcase, as well as attractive clientele (besides the two sitting outside)

In the restaurant, on the left-hand wing of the hotel, a rather suave waiter is attending to a customer and behind him is a feature of the dining room, a mural depicting the local area.

Bear in mind that both of these layouts have been modelled to a scale of 4mm - so a 6-foot figure is only 1 inch high...


Remember the two men working in the road on last weeks blog? They were from the Electricity board, not the Council - they have since acquired a toolbox and a multi-meter.
(This little diorama was built by an old customer (now sadly deceased) of Pat and Mary)

I think that's enough for this post - I'll finish with another short video that I took at Pete's - this time showing the Bachmann model of the Thomas The Tank engine locomotive 'Rhynas', taken, brand new straight from the box - and it ran perfectly - no hesitance, no jerking, and no noise. I haven't touched the soundtrack:

Stay well everyone, and thank you for visiting the blog

Cheerio,

Shaun.