Salfords Light Railway

The Salfords Light Railway diary

July 2002

Compared to most people, I am building the SLR "backwards". As of July 2002, I have just received my first item of rolling stock - a 4-wheel chassis. I have no locos and do not belong to a club, but I am building a track. Confused? All will become clear.

When I visited Paul Middleton of Ride on Railways (hereafter RoR) for his Open Day in May 2002 (see above), I spent much of the day running one of his TROJAN locos round the line. TROJAN is Paul's own design and I must say I was mightily impressed - except that, frankly, I thought the body looked pretty ugly. Speaking to Paul he expressed an interest in working with me to produce a more "narrow gauge feel" body. I basically told him that when he had one ready, I'd buy it, no question. TROJAN is a powerful little loco and will be well suited to the gradients on my line. I am therefore keen to get my hands on one.

Some time in the future I will get a steam loco too (probably a Maxitrak Pearl or Arthur). Right at the beginning of my investigations I happened to visit Maxitrak just as they had a 5" Hunslet quarry loco secondhand. It was a lovely loco and just what I wanted. However someone effectively bought it out from under my nose, but I couldn't really afford it anyway. Talk about lousy timing, just what I wanted (and a good price too), but had I bought it, I couldn't have afforded anywhere to run it for months! Oh well, perhaps another one will show up when I do have the money.

After some debate with my neighbours, they agreed that a simple wood-panel fence would be better than the laurel hedge that is there at the moment. Strictly speaking that particular boundary is mine, so I could just take the hedge out whether they liked it or not, but it does no harm whatsoever to keep the peace with the neighbours.

Before:
During:	The landscape gardeners spent 4 days ripping out the old hedge and putting up the fence in its place, but they made a very nice job of it. I came home during the hedge removal and was dumbstruck to see how much foliage came off of the hedge. How I ever imagined I could remove that myself I don't know.
After:

I've been working on my only piece of rolling stock (so far). A drop-side open wagon, sort-of your typical British style open wagon. It is coming along well. I'm building it on one of RoR's unsprung 4-wheel chassis. 5" gauge is great, nice and chunky!

[ author: - last updated 12th Nov 2002 ] [ HOME ]