Oh Snow

April 26, 2015
Having had a couple of weeks of Spring/Summer like weather our thoughts had been turning towards bridge building. It was quite a surprise to look up from typing the previous post and see that it was snowing. It's still piling up now, so no chance of concreting in our newly acquired holding down bolts for a while.

Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : Construction 

 

New buffer beams for Helen

April 26, 2015
Recently we decided it was time to replace Helen's banana shaped buffer beams and wonky buffers. Previously the buffer beams were made of poor quality knotty softwood, and one of the front buffers was particularly squint because we had failed to notice that the bolts that hold them in place (not positioned by us!) were not in line. We hope you will agree the new steel buffer beams are an improvement.

Before


After


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Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : Locomotives 

 

A Lucky Coin

November 2, 2014


As the bridge abutments near completion, we decided there would be no harm in a little superstition to help ensure their success. A little research showed that bridge builders often placed a coin near the top of abutments for good luck, so we're placing a 2014 coin in each abutment.

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Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : Bridge 

 

Bridge Foundations

June 15, 2014

It seems (and is) a long time since work first started on the bridge site. At last some progress has been made by digging the foundations for the bridge abutments, filling with well compacted hardcore and getting the shuttering in place for casting the bases. We hope to cast the concrete soon and then we will feel that at least we are out of the ground.
At the risk of sounding more like a weather report than a railway building blog, we experienced some interesting weather whilst doing this wor...
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Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : Bridge 

 

A Competition Win

January 4, 2014
We were pleased to win the PNP Railways Christmas competition with Karen's picture of KLR rails in the snow.

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Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : General News 

 

Season's Greetings

December 20, 2013


Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 

Thanks for visiting our web site, more coming soon!!!

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Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : Web site updates 

 

A Really Useful Engine

July 2, 2013
'Helen' has proved to be a 'Really Useful Engine' with her built in walking stick holder. Imagine how annoying it is when you need to use a walking stick, only to find you have left it somewhere back down the line. No such problems with this engine!


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Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : Locomotives 

 

Bridge design

June 28, 2013
The basic oval (phase 1 on the Track Plan page) is now more or less complete except for construction of the bridge. As usual a surprising amount of time has been used moving piles of stones and stripping/relaying turfs. At least today's rain is welcome as it should give the newly laid turfs a good watering.

The idea for the bridge is to keep it structurally simple, but add some decorative ironwork to make the design appear more complex. Structurally we intend using two 'universal' steel beams ...
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Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : Bridge 

 

Embankment Building

May 22, 2013
We've been dodging the rain and hail showers to build the embankment along towards the bridge site. This has involved moving a fair amount of hardcore and using some of the rock collection we have amassed to build a scenic retaining wall. Much easier said than done! Thoughts are now turning towards how to build the bridge............


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Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : Construction 

 

A bit of progress and a day out

April 28, 2013
We managed to lay another length of track during the last week. Originally we were going to build in the pair of points leading to the proposed station branch somewhere along this section. Instead we decided to lay plain track for now, in order to get the basic oval of track laid and give us a long (up to infinite!) length of run as soon as possible. We will be working out exactly where the points are going to be so that we can incorperate rail joins at the right places to allow us to simply ...
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Posted by Rupert Connor. Posted In : Construction 

 
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