Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas to all of the friends of Swaynton.

Latest news, I have just got around to changing the website, is that we are not going to be at Melksham in 2013. This frees us up to accept an invite to the Crawley MRS show at Horsham in April. As yet we have yet to get confirmation.
That will give us our three outings for 2013 and a possible outing in 2014.

So on with plans for 2013.
Progress is still static with the curved boards. It is a case of rain holding off play as there is no room to cut and assemble them indoors. The plan is to create two curves to either turn Swaynton into a roundy-roundy or have the option to put the end-to-end fiddle yards behind the layout. The rational for this is that exhibition managers seem to have an issue with the dead areas at the ends of the layout where the current fiddle yards are. Also a through deck fiddle yard would also allow us to run longer trains. We do feel a little embarrassed that we can only run 5 coach trains. The Belle looks particularly truncated. We are hoping that we can run trains up to ten coaches long. The current method of Fiddle yard operation doesn't allow us to do that even though we can extend each end be another six feet should we so wish (and the exhibition manager grants us the space).

We have also been looking at the stock. There will some new editions at the next outing (hopefully depending on how much life gets in the way...etc). Stock has been purchased and is being converted to run some foreign train formations. There were some inter-regional trains that came to Bournemouth. York and Birkenhead for instance. As well as a pigeon special.
Anyone got any ideas how to replicate several hundred pigeons taking off?

I must also have a look at the coal in the coal merchants yard. When I planted the coal slaithes I didn't realise (forgot to research properly) that the coal would have arrived pregraded and so the slaithes would have different grades of coal in them. Doh!

We also have to plant the ground signals (dummies) that I have made up.

Unfortunately the location for each one seems to have hit a baseboard cross member!
Anyway the plan is to get these planted and working. So Douglas will have to be busy making up some more slugged solenoids.

Ah well time for some more mulled wine.

Happy Modelling.

A

December Meeting

Just a reminder that tonights meeting of the North West Surrey Area Group of the EMGS meeting is in Walton NOT Woking as advertised in the EMGS newsletter. we had to swap the dates around.

Up for discussion tonight is change of venue for the exhibition calender. It seems that we will not be going to Melksham this year so we have another invite for that date. (I will update the website when details are known)
Also progress on stock for Swaynton.
Tales from Metropolitan Junction.
and the rest of the usual nonsense.

Next meeting of the EMGS North West Surrey Area Group (NWSAG) in November.

The venues for the December and November meetings have been swapped.
So see you all at WOKING this week.
Detials are in the EMGS newsletter. If you don't have a copy or want to know where or just want to come to a meeting send me a message via the website.

Up for discussion:

So Swaynton is to be partly assembled and spruced up for another photo session in the next month.

It's last photo session was a couple of years ago when MRJ commisioned an article on the layout. Phillip Hall spent the day photographing the model and came up with the striking picture used in our banner.

Douglas will be bringing along the electromagnet for testing of AJ's.

Richard should have more tales from Metroplolitan Junction.

Welcome to Swaynton

I will start by welcoming you to the Blog of Swaynton. The intention is that this blog will follow the progress (or lack of) on Swaynton for Millcliffe-on-Sea, or as it simply known, Swaynton.

For those of you not familiar with the layout I will refer you to our webpage here.

Looking back over the material I have I am surprised at how long it has taken us to get the layout to this point. And it is still not finished! The Layout was started way back in 1995, some people tell me that an exhibition layout should only have a ten year life!
I am hoping that other members of the team will help contribute to this little blog as well as other readers with suitable comments, suggestions and hopefully some discussions about the layout and the time and era it depicts.

We will also post suitable blog entries from other blogs here as a point of reference.

I have started this blog by placing into the banner what I think is now the classic picture of Swaynton taken by Phillip Hall and published in MRJ (Model Railway Journal, Wild Swan).