After rain... midges

It finally rained the other night so I decided that I'd go and get some footage of FR trains and their waterfalls. The most notable one being at Tanygrisiau where the line crosses over the Afon Cwmorthin. Unfortunately the tree growth over the last few years has meant that the falls and the train are virtually invisible from the road where you can get to video it. However I got a few shots around the area and a reasonable crack at the shot I went for... sort of. After the train passed I walked up above the line to get some shots of the falls from above.

 

What waterfall?

How do the car drivers know when to come past to knacker my shot?

I must come back on a sunny day and get this shot with a train in it

 

After that I drove down to TYB to one of my favourite locations on the FR, Creau bank. Because it is surrounded by trees it gets overlooked but it is pretty much as tall as Cae Mawr. The stream which passes under it has a wooden bridge over a waterfall and it is all in a very pretty little valley which leads down to Llyn Mair below.

 

It was a while before a train was due so I contented myself getting some pretty shots of the water and so on. I thought that there would be more water than there was but this area is always damp being in the temperate rainforest which the side valley with TYB in it creates.

 

 

 

This is a bit of a new thing, shot on my phone so you can see the camera set up

 

Anyway once the down and up trains has passed by, I went back to Port to pop an antihistamine pill and then edit and upload the following little package. I set the pictures to a tune called After Rain as this seemed appropriate. Some people have commented positively on this and others moan; it is impossible to please everyone all the time but most of these shots have very little natural soundtrack and it also allows me to use the shot at TYG which has the car passing in front of the camera which you see in the still picture.

 

Here is the video, I rather like it.

 



 

Quarry Hunslets are like busses.

Well, OK they aren't very like busses except that they seem to come along in groups in my life.

 

In this instance its King of the Scarlets, or is it? It seems that like most of the preserved locos in this and its related classes, all is not what it seems. Because of the way in which they were used and maintained in the quarries, boilers, frames and tanks all got swapped around to keep the fleet running. This one has Maid Marians frames I believe and the tank from a different one... any way we call it King of the Scarlets and now it has taken the space which Princess formerly occupied in Spooner's.

 



The process of getting her inside was pretty much the same, but in reverse of how we got Princess out.

The grubby state of the loco is explained by the fact that when she was sold in 1965 she went to Canada, was put into storage and stayed there until repatriated earlier this year. The paintwork had been slapped on before the sale in 1965 but otherwise she is in ex quarry condition. The dirt is what 50 years in a barn can do for you..

A bit of fresh timber wouldn't go amiss

 

Next year she will leave the bar and go to Stafold Barn for a careful restoration which will get her running but keep the work worn look of her.

 

You can see the video of the process here. It looks quick in the video but took all day.



Apart from that I've been out and about with the camera capturing the railways in the sunshine, just in case it doesn't last.

 

 

Today I popped out onto The Cob work site and got some up to date shots of the work, over the last week they have laid some track past the signal box which now has windows with glass in and everything. Plenty to do still.

 

How time flies when you're having fun

I can't believe that it is so long since I last posted on here. Needless to say I haven't been doing nothing, far from it. The Easter rush which is supposed to die down hasn't and so the shops like the trains have been mad busy. Nothing to complain about but 'spare time' has been in short supply.

The Driver's Eye View disk is getting nearer completion, in fact disk one is ready to go in the boxes, the covers are printed, so are the disks. I'm just waiting on getting a final correction of the route names for the down trip and then it can hit the shops.

With the weather continuing to be fabulous I'm hoping to get the second section of the WHR in the camera this week. Fingers crossed. We've got a different microphone to mount on the camera which should help get a good sound track without the use of a separate sound recorder. Watch this space.

The year in the life 2013 is getting bigger by the minute and may end up as a three disk epic as the work on the cob widening is threatening to consume a hefty chunk of disk real estate.

Since following Griff Rhys Jones and his film crew about I've been out on several projects worthy of note. The first will add a few minutes to the Cob Widening chapter which was when The Cob was closed one evening so that a concrete pump and mixer lorry could pump the concrete into the shuttering to form the bases for the new signalling. Not glamorous and it was cold, too.

 

The second was a chase the train in the rain job when Bagnall, Isaac which Boston Lodge have been restoring for use on the L&B went for a run up the WHR with sister WHHR loco Gelert. Gelert's boiler ticket ran out at the end of June so the trip took place not a minute too soon. Unfortunately the weather was foul which limited the run. I got soaked to the skin and despite the camera's rain coat it got pretty wet too. Both of us have come through unscathed.

 

 

Isaac on the train and Gelert waiting to join it

 

You can see the video for this here...

 



 

The railway played host to some youngsters who play in a school Steel Band so not being one to miss out on a dance I popped over to Pen Cei to video them play.

The sun carried on shining and this made my next task a pleasure. Lilla and Hugh Napier with a selection of FR slate wagons spent the weekend in Llanberis on the Llanberis Lake Railway. Both these locos were Penrhyn quarry machines. Penrhyn and Dinorwig quarries were huge rivals so to see PQR black in the very heart of Dinorwig at Gilfach Ddu was quite something.

 

And here is the video. There will be a longer version on the Year in the Life 2013.

 

Busy, busy, busy

Since my last post on here the camera and I have been out several times to capture the fantastic weather we are having at the moment.

The Harbour at Porthmadog



The most important thing I've done is to shoot the video for the FR Driver's Eye View. Now I just need to do the second part of the WHR and the extras disk and I can get the much promised boxed set out.

 

The camera is mounted on a clamp which holds onto the handrail of the loco, Merddin Emrys in this case. This takes care of the picture but the sound from the camera microphones is too distorted and wind blasted to use so I also recorded the whole journey on the Zoom handheld audio recorder which is more controllable. I held this out the window of the carriage behind the loco so the audio image is very good. The two recordings then need to be synced together in the edit. This is relatively easy to do as things like whistles blowing make a very visually obvious waveform so I just slide the wildtrack recording along the timeline until they line up, mute the camera sound and hey presto, nicely recorded in sync audio.

 

The tricky part of this project is adding the titles with the route names. This took me a whole day and now I need to get someone with better route knowledge than me to check |I've got them in the correct places. We are also trying to work out a way of having the text in a closed caption subtitle so that they can be turned on or off by the watcher. So far this is proving to be a bit tricky.

As the sun kept on shining I decided to get out and video some trains and some bluebells. The flowers this year have been amazingly bright and plentiful so I drove up to TYB before the first train and wandered about in the woods taking video of bluebells and the lake and then stomped up to the railway just above Plas Halt where I got a cracking shot of Merddin on the 10:15 ex Port.

A quick trip back to Port and then back to TYB for a shot or 2 in the station and then I went for a stomp in the woods to get some more lineside shots. I thought I would be clever and cut through the woods off the path... this wasn't clever and involved me clambering over fallen trees and up to my ankles in swamp. It also involved me falling flat on my face and slamming the camera into ground, fourtunately only my pride was dented. I got to the lineside about ten feet from where I would have done had I followed the path and set up exactly where I would have done.

 

The upshot of all this mucking about is the following video which looks a good deal more tranquil than the shooting of it was.

 





Yesterday the great weather continued which was fortunate as we had a visiting camera crew from ITV 1 videoing a segment for a programme with Griff Rhys Jones. It will go out in January next year.

He went on a specially run train consisting of Prince and carr 19 and the CRV, all of which looked a fine sight in the sunshine.

We chased the train from Port to TYB stopping a couple of times for them to shoot run pasts.

We then all climbed aboard the train and proceeded up the line stopping at Dduallt to do a run past. Once we got to Blaenau Griff left the train to go on his 'content rich' way and to make the rest of the programme.

I made a short and quite rough little package about this which you can see here.

 

Sunny sunshine

A bank holiday weekend and the sun was out. Unheard of. I grabbed the camera and off I went. I drove straight up to Tanygrisiau because I've been meaning to walk out onto the dam for ages so that is what I did, I walked about halfway along it and set up the camera; I would have gone further but I heard the train whistle on the other side of the Moelwyns so I knew I only had a couple of minutes.

 

After this I went down to TYB and got some nice sunshine pics without trains in. Flowers and blue sky etc. I had lunch and when the up train arrived I climbed aboard.

 

I went up to Blaenau and back to TYB again but some clouds had gathered over the mountains so I didn't get as much footage as I'd hoped to.

That was Saturday and on Sunday the sky was just as blue so when I left home for work I paused at the Pen Llyn end of Llyn Padarn to get some shots of Snowdon and the lake. I then decided that as the there wasn't a cloud in the sky I'd go to Porthmadog via Rhyd Ddu and get some more Snowdon shots from there.



 

Once I got to Port I decided to upload yesterdays footage to the computer and do a quick edit before going out to chase the WHR trains. In Port the cloud had rolled in from the sea so I wasn't sure if I'd get anything worth looking at from up the line. However, I needn't have worried as the sun was doing its thing as soon as I got away from the coast.

 

 

The Aberglaslyn Pass was my first port of call because although maybe over done as a location, it is still a lovely place. Sure enough 138 chuffed and clanked into view heading down hill.

The next place I could find a place to park was the other side of Castell Cidwm bridge as there were more cars driving and parking badly than I ever remember seeing. I know where all the swivel eyed loons were this weekend!

 

I then set off to catch up with and overtake the train but the traffic made this virtually impossible so the next decent shot I got was of the train departing from Waunfawr. I gave up at this point and slowly made my way back to Harbour Station.

I finished the edit and uploaded the package to Youtube before leaving for home. Whether attracting more people to the area is a good idea I'm not sure but it's grey, wet and windy today but it is bank holiday Monday.

 

Half a year

Since Rail Ale and Steam 150 I've been running round trying to catch up with all the things I haven't had time to do; like paperwork and keeping the shops stocked. However I'm floating just below the surface now so I've found a few odd half hours here and there to start getting the first disk of the 2013 Year in the life set together. I've surprised myself by finding that the first disk is now completely full. partly this is with things which happened at the end of 2012 when the DVDs for then were already full but mainly its because we've been so busy.

This is the DVD architect screen for disk one. many things may change by the time it goes on sale but it gives a flavour of what to expect.

Next big sales push will be for |Peter Johnson's new book, The Forty Mile Railway, which we are publishing. It should have been with us this week but now seems like it will next week now. Jolly good it is too.

 

All down the pub...

Well, strictly down the goods shed.

I spent most of the day chasing trains round Gwynedd. I'm sure drinking beer is nice, no really, I have a pint by my side as I type but watching people drinking beer is not so good. Consequently there is a short section of 'beer action', but mostly its trains.

I followed the 10:50 from Port which was The Earl and 4 FR coaches. My first shot was at Nantmor which is a splendid spot and nice and peaceful.

Chased it to Beddgelert just in time to get the train arriving and then yomped up into the field above the station to get the departure on all three tines of the S bend.

Back in the car and off to Rhyd Ddu.

Anyway, you get the picture. I went to Caernarfon and rode the Prince hauled shuttle up to Waunfawr and back to Dinas where I shot the beer drinking stuff and caught the shuttle back to Cofiland and my car.

Anyway, I edited the footage this morning. There was just over an hours worth of video and I got the main edit done and it came out at about 20 minutes which I then chopped down to 10 for Youtube, which is what you see here.