We had a lovely sunny day for our Open Day this year when we raised £200.00 for the Welsh Air Ambulance. The 5″ ride on railway was very popular as was the remote control car competition organised by Peter Crabtree.

Following a visit from the Grandchildren, new videos have been done of the ride on train and the steam train:

The constuction of a 5″ gauge ride on railway has now started and Kelly and Eira were the first visitors to have a ride.

A small piece of history is attached to the introduction of live steam to my railway,  I have purchased the last ever Samson locomotive produced by Cheddar Models Ltd.
Samson comes complete with Radio Control, bastorial valve gear, fully sprung driving wheels, bronzed axle bearings and insulated wheels so that track powered trains can be run at the same time.
Samson seems to be a well engineered locomotive and I will  be putting it to the test as soon as I have  purchased a box of matches and a canister of gas.

This years open day was a great success and raised £250.00 for the Kampala Childrens Centre. Thank you to all who attended.

With the new station area and branch line almost complete the railway has almost reached its intended size.
The larger the railway the bigger the problems with maintenance, therefore I have decided that my 180mtrs length of track work is enough.
I will now concentrate on the completion of the control room ,I also intend to build a church and signal box over the winter months.

ELECTRICS

Although being used at much less than the 5amp rating my two Gaugemaster controllers have failed during the past few months, I have now replaced them with a 10amp Aristo-Craft power pack with controllers which have much improved the all round performance, also the smoke units are producing much more smoke.
I have fitted change – over switches so that I can use the conventional controllers in the control room or walk around with the radio controlled train engineer system.

LOCOMOTIVES

The Aristocraft Pacific 4-6-2 loco I purchased last year has been excellent, it has great pulling power even on the gradients and it must have covered many real miles, it has been completely trouble free and I haven’t even had to clean the wheels!
The U25-B Diesel continues to be trouble free apart from the occasional wheel clean.
Due to an unfortunate collision I need a new part for the tender on my 0-4-0 Switcher, Unfortunately I am told that the spare part could take up to 12 months to arrive from America so I intend to attempt a temporary repair.

The railway is run regularly between Easter and October so if you would like to visit then please email me at mail@ghpowell.co.uk. to make arrangements.

Living in North Wales is not a good place for garden railways (according to the G Scale Society membership list) as I seem to be the only person in the district with any interest in G-Scale. However this has not prevented me from building my own garden railway in a not very level garden. One of my problems is that I tend to rush into things, I am the type of person who builds a kit model and then reads the instructions afterwards. This was the same with my garden railway, not enough research resulting in some jobs having to be done twice. The first problem was to get the track from the storage area (my garage) to a reasonable level part of the garden some 40ft away. This resulted in a high level section of over 5ft above ground level in places. The bridges took some time to build but well worth the effort.

Included in the high level section is a suspension bridge built with concrete towers both 8ft high covering a double track span of 25feet suspended by strands of fencing wire. The whole weight of the wooden track bed and track is held by the suspension wires, it has not needed any repairs or adjustment since built some six years ago.

My engines and rolling stock are limited at the moment as the 400ft of aristo-craft track purchased over the past years has been the main priority. My motive power at the moment is the Aristo-Craft 0-4-0 switcher with sound tender and the U25-B Diesel. Just recently I purchased a Lil Critter switcher loco which will be used for moving rolling stock in my proposed new goods yard. All three locos have proved to be excellent runners. The Aristo-Craft track and the train engineer have been trouble free, however I was disappointed with the auto switch motors so I have now purchased some LGB points which seem to have a stronger motor action. Some confusion did arise when I found they were DC operated despite the box indicating that they were AC.

I do enjoy making the buildings for the railway and found this quite an easy job because of the large scale, a visit to Bekonscot gave me some good ideas.