Little trains, big room

I spent the weekend in Birmingham at the Warley Model Railway Exhibition which is held over 2 days in the NEC every November. As these things go it was enormous and the standard of modelling was very high. PECO announced that they will be selling ready to run 009 models from the new year which caused quite a bit of excitement including from me.

I trailed along with the F&WHR sales stand which did very well but I also had the trusty Sony with me and took a few shots. I'm going to follow our locos about on their tour next year so this will be some footage for that package but I've put a short programme together which you can see here.

 

A Year is a long time

Finally, I've finished the 'Year in Snowdonia' DVD and there are copies on the shelves to buy. What a relief to finally get it finished. Three years it has taken me to get the footage together, I only hope that the weather next year is half as good as I've made it look on the DVD.

I'm off to Birmingham at 5am tomorrow to get some footage of Lyd at the NEC for the Warley model railway exhibition. The show is on Saturday and Sunday but the set up starts early on Friday and Lyd needs to be first through the door on the low loader. If you see me there come and point and laugh.
 

Going Underground

Up with the lark this morning... well it was still dark. Arrived in Port about 7am in plenty of time to catch the Metropolitan Railway coach being transported over the cob and lifted onto a lorry in Wilco's car park.

This was to be the last part of a package about the restoration of carriage 353 for the 150th anniversary of the Underground next year. I have been following the work in Boston Lodge since it arrived.

 

Princess leaves 'The Spoon'

An early start in the pub today today, is it too early to be sat at the bar at 7.30am? Well, I was drinking coffee and videoing the removal of the glass doors and windows in the end of Spooner's. Spooner's, of course, used to be the goods shed and these glass doors are the replacement for the wooden doors. The reason the doors were coming off? So that captive England 0-4-0 Princess could be released. Next year is the 15oth anniversary of steam on the FR and Princess was the one of the first four locos on the line. She will be cosmetically restored and go travelling as an ambassador for the railway including a six week stay at Paddington from St David's day.

I didn't just have a cup of coffee in front of me, the trusty Sony was there too as you can see.

Progress was steady rather than swift, here you can see the metal slides used to move the loco in line with the doorway.

Once Princess was back on the rails she was towed back to Boston Lodge by Kerr Stuart, Stanhope which has stayed on since Quarrypower.

As soon as the Fire engine which is standing in for Princess was in place and on video I beetled back up stairs and uploaded the days footage and then edited it down from about and hour to just over eight minutes. A bit of a rough cut but I wanted to get it rendered and uploaded before the afternoon was over, it took just under an hour to render to a wmv file and then slightly longer than this to upload to Youtube. Anyway here it is...

 

Semi tropical paradise - Snowdonia

Having been working on the Year in Snowdonia project it was relatively easy to make a short video highlighting the area when I was asked to tart up the short package I made for the Best of Britain and Ireland exhibition which took place in 2010. That project was sprung on me out of the blue so I had next to no footage of the surrounding area but as it was a railway focused video that wasn't too bad, the latest piece needed to be more general.

This was the original BoBi video.

I started with the Bobi video and swapped out the music for a track made for the Year in Snowdonia and also changed most of the pictures too.

This is the new video.

I think the improvement in camera quality, if nothing else, shows and there are more varied locations. As I type this the sun is out and the sky is blue so, for once, the tele isn't lying.