Points and new toys

I've finally finished making a package on the progress at Harbour Station which you will see below and the new disk printer has arrived.

 

I've had a quick play with it and it seems to be much better quality than the old one but the best thing about it is that I can print 100 disks in one batch without loading each disk individually by hand, as with the old machine. It has a robot arm which picks up a blank disk, puts it in the printer tray and then picks it up and puts it in the output tray, lovely. It wasn't cheap but will earn its keep very quickly once the season gets under way.



It was a bit wet

 

On the day the new points were delivered by road from where they had been in store in Minffordd yard the wind blew, the rain fell and the temperature didn't get above zero. Brrr.

 

 

Anyway, here is the video which starts in early in the year and comes up to date.

 

 



Points and snow

The weather has been horrid... for years now but more specifically this week. The points for the new layout
in harbour station were delivered this Thursday and me and the camera were there to record the event and the freezing rain.

Each pair of points came in two parts and were craned off as you can see above. The first set to arrive was the WHR loop point and the second is the king point which will select between the WHR platform and the FR one, this second unit is much longer as FR trains will need to go over it at line speed. I'll put together a package on the work so far next week when I've got some footage of the installed points.

With the snow forecast for today I decided that another day in the studio made sense so that's what I've done. I pretty much finished the programming for the WHR card music despite the temperature in the studio starting at 3 Celcius this morning. The edit of the video is now the correct length and the music fitted nicely, but there are still a few musical phrases that need re-programming to tidy them up.  By 4pm when I finished it had crept up to a tropical 10. I spent the day in jumper and coat. Adding some guitar parts is the next stage but my fingers were numb so my usually poor playing was pitiful so I gave up on that idea.

Freezing my tits off

 Snowing outside the window

Always sunny on telly

The new drum machine sounds great and the Akai it is replacing is now listed on eBay, shame to get rid of it but I need the cash.

New year, new toys

The new year is with us and January is half over already and not a squeak from me. Well, I've been busy with editing and making music for the WHR Postcard MK2.

I've been working on the Fred DVD which is coming along nicely and is nearly done. Fred has been very helpful in finding pictures to illustrate his story mostly they have been prints which I've scanned but he has also found some nice 35mm slides which I need to get digitised. Also pending for this project is a quick trip up the FR to get some shots of various places mentioned which we didn't get in September. I should get this done in February half term when the railway will be back in one piece and the P Way guys will have a minute to help me.

In addition to 'Fred - the movie' I've been putting together a DVD postcard for the marketing dept which they will give away when Princess goes to Paddington in March. It will have three main chapters being an advert for Snowdonia and 5 minute packages of the FR and the WHR. These are pretty much finished having used some of the music I did for the Year in Snowdonia DVD.

The music for the new WHR postcard is coming along and I've re cut the video to hit the various changes in the music. I've just got a new drum module from eBay which has nicer sounds on than the Akai machine I've been using previously. It's always nice to have a new toy to play with and often inspires new ideas.

New drum box is bottom right

The other new toy which I haven't actually got yet is a new disk printer as the old one is pretty worn out. The new one can do 100 disks in a batch rather than doing them one at a time as I have to do now. It should be better quality printing and save me time when in 'factory' mode.

The camera hasn't been entirely idle either. I've been amassing footage of the rebuilding of harbour station and should have a progress report to show you sometime next week. The new points are being delivered tomorrow which should be interesting.