Bonds at the Rocks By Rail Museum!

A slight play on words there in case anyone thinks that the latest James Bond film is featuring a scene at the Rocks By Rail Museum. We did however have an operating day today and a good show was put on for those who visited. Our guests included the Bond Owners Club. The Club is centered around the Bond Minicars of the 1950s and 60s and I can do no better than direct anyone to their website if he pictures below make you curious about these wonderfully characterful cars. Click here to go to the Bond Owners Club.

We did have steam running for the brake van rides complete with what the suppliers claimed was smokeless coal!

With the Jubilee celebrations going on even the Museum was decked out.

OK it may not have been elaborate but we tried!

This mornings bike ride and this afternoons drive home revealed these gems of creativity for the Jubilee.

Maybe he is saluting because he thinks I am James Bond...........

  

Jubilee!

Well today is the day we celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of the Queen. 70 years on the throne and for most of the Country we have known no one else as the Head of State. Lots of celebrations around the Country with things like this being done in a local village.

Even the crows at the back of WMD HQ seemed to be getting into the spirit with this gathering and lots of crow type chatter.

Model making wise not much done but I did think it appropriate to dig out my Hornby Royal Train Pack bought back in 2004 and I am sorry to say never run yet. That will change soon but I will either have to DCC chip the loco which was never designed for DCC or find by DC controller and see if that will work. The pack was released by Hornby in 2004 after the the Queen and Prince Philip carried out a train tour of the UK in the summer of 2002 with the loco in the pack being the one that hauled the train.

The loco is a Coronation Class LMS 4-6-2 named Duchess of Sutherland and despite being nearly 20 years old is nicely detailed..

Carriages are models of those in the actual train and I do have the extension pack with another three carriages somewhere which will make it a great looking train. Just hope I get to actually run this before the next jubilee!

Hedging my bets!

A cool start to June but the bike ride this morning saw me put another 20 miles on top of the 2390 that I have managed up to the end of May without getting too hot. However as the day warmed up I thought I would hedge my bets by getting the hedge cutting on Mrs. Woody's list of jobs to be done before doing anything else. Good job I did as with all these things in my life the time I estimated the job would take doubled in reality! So not as much model making time but in good books (I hope!) with Mrs. W. The garden does look better with a set of trimmed hedges.

Despite limited model making time I did manage to get some more done on the MiniArt Egyptian T34 tank. Both sides are now grab handled up in brass wire and the external fuel tank cradles are in place as well as the towing cables. You can see the difference the wire grab handles make with this photo where the last of the plastic handles is yet to be replaced.

This kit is certainly not a weekend special! Hopefully I have hedged my bets with the other kit of the artillery version of this tank that I have yet to build which is a simpler build and should come as a relief after this one and hopefully started before the hedges need cutting again!

Rain stops mowing.

Todays trip to the Rocks By Rail Museum was supposed to see me get the mower out for another session of grass cultivation. However, the weather had other ideas with rain making the grass too wet to cut so I had to find another activity. I had noted that the recent wet and warm weather had encouraged the growth of weeds in the track bed. Now whilst weed control would normally be taken care of with a spray of weed killer from a suitably equipped train this is Rocks by Rail so I hand weeded the area around the station. I don't think anyone will say, wow someone has been doing a lot of weeding! However, hopefully subconsciously guests may feel that the place is cared for. We will have to wait and see what reaction we get on the operating day this Friday but I think it looks good!

 

 I did have some supervision from Riley the dog who probably knows more about the Museum than I do!

In between the rain I did have time to have a look at the display models in the Sundew cafe. Phil Parker's model railway layout (see it on his blog by clicking here or watch the first of Hornby's videos on this project here.) always attracts and entertains younger guests and we are fortunate in having it. It does get 'played' with so on occasions the little details do require some maintenance and I see I will need to bring some glue in when I go back again.

At the other end of the spectrum of models are these detailed scenes of quarrying including a massive model of Sundew the World's largest walking drag line.

There are also some informative displays on the history of iron ore mining and I really must find time to reacquaint myself with the contents sometime!

I can't escape Riley's supervision!

I will be back Bank Holiday Friday when the Museum will have a full on operating day - great!

More wire bending!

A odd half hour in amongst other jobs has seen the T34 Egyptian tank progress a little further. The remainder of the external fuel tank cradles have been fitted together with some more brass wire substituting for the plastic kit part which broke into pieces as I tried to cut it free from the sprue. I have also replaced one of the already fitted grab handles with a bent wire version which looks better. No doubt I will be bending even more wire as I get onto the other side. Not much progress today but the construction moves on which is the main thing!

The perils of detailed plastic kits!

After a hard day gardening I thought I would have a relaxing hour or so with the MiniArt Egyptian T34 tank kit. Nothing would be nicer to wind down after a day of toil under the watchful eye of Mrs. Woody then this! Look at plans. Decide that next part to fit are grab handles to the hull. Locate parts on the sprue. Look delicate so gently begin to cut off and snap! One of the perils of highly detailed kits is that the parts become so delicate that it is impossible to get them off the sprue without damage let alone clean up the joint where the part was attached to the sprue. Now at this point the swear jar could well have taken several donations from me but surprisingly I sat back and actually thought about the problem. I could try to glue the part together or use the spare one on the sprue. However the inevitable would be that I would face exactly the same problems again and that swear jar would actually become fuller!

In my late in life developed skill of working smarter and not harder I decided that the only sensible way to deal with the problem was to ignore the kit parts and make my own handles out of brass wire which, handily, I had in stock. A bit of careful bending using some small pliers and comparing with the intact kit part soon had some handles bent up and fitted. I used a piece of scrap plastic to hold the handles off the hull by the required amount whilst the super glue set. 

I think it was actually quicker doing this then having to deal with the kit parts. It certainly is a lot more robust then the plastic part. After an hour I had three handles in place and the beginnings of the external fuel drum mountings attached and I was still calm!

Sundew.

I won't be at the Rocks by Rail Museum tomorrow but there is an operational day so visitors will be treated to the sight and smell of locomotives and rolling stock in action as well as being able to enjoy the various exhibits around the site. They may also enjoy some refreshments in the Sundew cafe and think that it is a strange name to give it but there is logic in its naming.

In my wanderings around the site, now usually with the mower keeping the grass down, I have, as already explained in a previous post, had the opportunity to get close to the exhibits. One of the more unusual exhibits, that visitors tomorrow can see, is one of the driving cabs of the walking excavator Sundew. In its time, Sundew was the largest walking drag line excavator in the World. It even 'walked' the 13 miles to Corby when mining operations in its home quarry Exton Park in Rutland ended. Unfortunately in 1987 following the ending of iron ore mining at Corby, Sundew was cut up for scrap. There are more details about Sundew on the Rocks by Rail website which you can see by clicking here. 

Despite being scrapped one of the cabs survived and was donated to the Museum in its then guise as the Rutland Railway Museum. The cab is big but when you look at the size of Sundew in photographs it pales into insignificance! During its time at the Museum it has been restored and now lives on as the only part of Sundew that remains apart from peoples memories of this monster and the name of the cafe!

The interpretive board giving details of the 13 mile walk to Corby.

The cab is big - I am betting there are apartments in London with less space!

Could do with a wash but still not too bad for being over 70 years old! That grass looks nice and trimmed too!

The cab fittingly now overlooks the Museum's quarry face.

Fulfilling a childhood ambition!

It has been a busy and tiring couple of weeks what with Mrs. Woody's new wardrobe, desk and room painting tasks together with the inevitable sort out that such things lead to - four large bags and three boxes of things to go out! This together with several labour intensive but very satisfying days at the Rocks by Rail Museum mean that model making time has been limited. 

I did manage to put together two jerry cans for the Egyptian T34 tank. Whilst other manufactures would have limited this to two kit parts, MiniArt managed to break them down to five parts! Not that exciting to look at but for a half hour it was just enough for me to walk out of my Man Cave afterwards with a sense of having at least done some modelling. 

However I was thinking about model railways this morning whilst doing some of Mrs. W's jobs on her never ending list - just don't tell her my mind wandered from the task in hand! My mind was actually taken back to my childhood by a post of Phil Parkers blog this morning about the Triang Dock Shunter - click here. to see it. 

I guess for those of a certain age there were certain things that as a child we really wanted but pocket money didn't extend that far and birthdays and Christmas brought other things. One of those things I really wanted was the Triang Dock Shunter. No idea why it figured so highly on my 'want' list but it did. Maybe it was the shape which was unlike real locomotives or maybe it was the working headlight. Whatever it was passing time put the desire to the back of my mind until about ten years ago when looking round the second hand model shop in Sheringham, Norfolk (anyone who has visited the town with an interest in models will know the shop) I saw one on the shelf at the back of the counter. Suddenly I was child again and the £20 price tag was affordable and seemed reasonanle to my adult wallet. A quick decision was made whilst Mrs. W was busy perusing the nearby handbag shop, that the shunter should come home with me and finally fulfill that reawakened childhood ambition.

Here it is on my terminus layout. It fully functions although it sounds as though it is chewing up the track when it runs but that headlight works! Still makes me so happy when I look at it and more so when it has a run. As Mrs. W reminds me, I am still a child at heart. You know what? She is probably right!

The delights of volunteering

'You volunteer at a railway museum - do you drive the trains?' is a question I often get asked when people find out I am a volunteer at the Rocks by Rail Museum. Whilst I have ridden on some of the locomotives apart from being a Driver for a Fiver when I visited before becoming a volunteer I have never driven a locomotive whilst actually volunteering. In fact when I joined I made it clear I had no pretentions of being a train driver but I was there to put something into the museum with whatever skills I have. That is what I have done getting involved in all sorts of things with a group of like minded guys who are great to be with. At the moment I seem to be chief grass cutter. We don't have a huge volunteer base so we all have to be able to turn our hands to whatever needs doing. Grass cutting may not be glamorous but it makes a big difference especially at a site as large as Rocks by Rail. Our guests may not notice the cut grass as they wander about but they certainly would notice uncut grass if they had to wade through knee high wet grass. So today, despite having already been in on Tuesday I was back for half a day to do some more urgently needed cutting.

It does give me a lot of satisfaction to see what was an overgrown area turned into an area that looks groomed! It also gives me a chance to see things at close hand that our guests can not. Me and the mower go places where no mower has ventured which brings me close to things I would never see so close up anywhere else. It may all look like a lot of rusty machinery and rolling stock but it is what the museum is all about - keeping the history of the iron stone industry in the locality alive for guests to appreciate and learn from. Without the volunteers none of this would be possible and to get some of this rusty stuff looking even better we need more volunteers. 

So here are some photos of what I was mowing around and if you are a fan of railways nothing could be more delightful! By the way you may appreciate the cut grass!

Open the hatch!

As I said before this MiniArt kit of the Egyptian T34 tank is parts heavy. An example is the drivers hatch.

The hatch is made up of 12 parts including a metal etched handle which are mostly on the underside which is inside the tank hull. The effort in putting all of this together is somewhat dashed when the instructions then suggest that the hatch should be in the closed position. Given the effort and detail I will be hopefully be leaving the hatch in an open position. This was a common thing to do in real life on these tanks when not in battle as it allowed the driver a better view and also acted as a ventilator in what, in Egypt, would be a hot interior for the crew. So in this case my order is 'Open the hatch!'.