Angst Lesspork

[Hugh Norwood]

Next outing is coming up soon -

The Amberley Museum is holding a "Discworld and Industrial trains" day on Sunday 20th October and they invited the layout along...!

 

There could well be cos-players in evidence!

More details on the museum web site here https://www.amberleymuseum.co.uk/whats-on/discworld-industrial-trains/

[Hugh Norwood]

Meanwhile...
I have been working on a little something to adorn some corner of the layout.

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The crows are from Modelu (they don't explain how they got them to stay stil long enough to scan!)
The cage and its occupant are from (the defunct) Shapeways and the gibbet itself is styrene strip...

[Hugh Norwood]

The Discworld and Industrial trains day at Amberley Museum was.... wet. I think it put a lot of people off coming, unfortunately  - they missed a great day.



I didn't get much of a look-round the extensive site (too wet...) but the bits I did see were very interesting; if it was a bit closer, I'd go again as a visitor.




I did meet Granny Weatherwax
{photo - John Varley}

[Hugh Norwood]

Off to Gaydon tomorrow! (I must be a sucker for punishment... And m'lady wife reminded me that the Barnsley show is only two weeks after that!)

[9604BHUR]

Ook!  ;D

That does look a nice layout you're building. 👍

[Hugh Norwood]

That does look a nice layout you're building. 👍

Thank you! - it's getting quite old (middle aged?) now.... (bit like me)

[Hugh Norwood]

The Hogfather

I was inspired by David Burleigh's photos, over on Facecloth, of his painted Modelu Santa and sleigh, to consider if I could kit-bash into the Hogfather from Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

All that was required in addition to the figure were four wild boar...

I found that Gaugemaster had in stock Faller set 151701 "Hunters and Wild Boar" - which contains 6 boar, so I sent off for one of these and for Santa and his sleigh from Modelu. Typically of me, this was early December - would the parts arrive before Christmas?

They did; I removed the support sprues from Santa:




And sorted out four of the boars from the Faller pack - and lined them up...

[Hugh Norwood]

They looked fine despite the boars being H0, so I removed the reindeer and painted the sleigh and Santa.



Unfortunately, I could not find a definitive version for the harnessing of reindeer for sleighs (and certainly not for wild boars!), so I decided to wing it and hope! I carefully drilled a 0.5mm hole through each boar and set them in two pairs using 0.45mm diameter brass handrail wire. A small loop was put in the centre of each of these two links, through which a longitudinal wire was passed to act as the link holding both pairs and the sleigh itself in a line. Hopefully the photo shows this arrangement.



The boars come painted a uniform brown; I dry-brushed black over their coats, gave them red eyes and a bit of read in their mouths, and tried to paint the tusks yellow.

A suggestion of harness was made by wrapping 1mm wide strips of paper round the boars and painting these red. The reins and traces are red sewing thread filtched from m'lady wife's sewing basket!

[Hugh Norwood]

I finished the "rigging" - tying up the threads - on Christmas Eve, so took the opportunity to photograph the sleigh on the Christmas Cake...

[Jeff Schumaker]

Nicely done, Hugh. It looks like the perfect topping for the cake.

Jeff

[Hugh Norwood]

Mileage

After returning from Narrow Gauge Now at Portland College, I set to wondering how far the layout has travelled over the years since its first outing in March 2011. Spreadsheet time! - plus a session with Google maps.

Angst has been to 52 shows and clocked up a total of 12327 miles. (That's just to and from show venues – I have travelled a bit further due to travelling between show venues and accommodations, but that would be small by comparison)

Swansea and Christchurch were equal longest trips at 560 miles return (which is odd as I expected the Isle of Wight would be further...) - the shortest trip was five miles return.

2014 and 2018 were the busiest years with 7 shows, but 2019 saw the highest mileage at 2256.

I realise there will be layouts with higher mileages - and, indeed, layout owners with more than one layout, who can also surpass this, but I found it an interesting exercise.

[Hugh Norwood]

The layout has had a working Clacks (semaphore) tower since the early days (I'm pretty certain it was there for its first outing)

Up until now, it has been powered by a battery box with six buttons on one side and peopel were encouraged to send a message - with the proviso they had to make up their own code.

Following on from the web-based simulation I made earlier this year, I have at last upgraded the Clacks tower to computer control. Here is a video showing the text that has been entered from a retired mobile phone being sent as semaphore signals..

[Hugh Norwood]

I've done a similar upgrade to the Popham semaphore model, but as that's not part of the layout, I have posted about it in the Electronics SIG forum here https://forum.009society.com/index.php?topic=5964.0

[Hugh Norwood]

Off on the road again.

Carlton Model Railway Society Show
at
Howden School
Derwent Rd
Howden
DN14 7AL

21/22 March 2026
No other details as yet (and they do not appear to have a web site)