Ups and downs!

The title sums up the progress today! Unfortunately for one of the trains there were no ups - only downs and that was the problem!

'Finished' laying the last sections of track first thing this morning before going off to the train shops again, leaving Andy to finish off still further. A visit to both my local train shops - still more money being parted from saw a few more bits of rolling stock, buffers, point motors etc. The highlights of the day were my purchase of a City of Sheffield DCC sound locomotive and dads collection of his chipped LMS loco.

Now all was fine but my heavy loco and the newly aquired 'Pullmans' coaches, (I know the 'City of Sheffield' would never have pulled Pullmans - it's a special and I liked them!) simply refused to go up some of the gradients. The supports had to be removed one by one and lowered together with modifications to the sidings to allow for the express to be got in and out!

Note all the supports in the middle being modified and re-numbered!

With the gradients modified, several sections of track had to either replaced or changed to allow for such things as the width of the station, (note it marked out on the base below,) or for sections of track that the train simply didn't like!

Eventually the loco's could be tried and the first time where two engines passed each other was recorded on camera.

Finally at gone 10.00, (yes, I AM on holiday!) the engines were put into the sidings and todays work was finished. Now at a stage we had hoped to be at over 24 hours earlier!

Now to the whale! This fine figure adorns the wall of the shed. Why, I hear you ask? Well, partly because it just happened to fall out as an off-cut from one of the pieces of ply wood that we cut and secondly because, well it as a whaleway after all!