The developing scenery of the ANLR

[laalratty]

Well I have still been carrying on with the upper loop, in fact it is looking quite smart now, after the addition of some large bits of slate from a slate waste tip and some crushed slate from the local aggregate supplier


This area now looks very presentable, with just a few areas to cover with crushed slate. There is however, a lot of planting to do in the spring.
On another note, the incline will be fully unveiled this weekend at my christmas steamup, it has already been tested with 3 loaded waggons going down pulling 3 empty waggons down, we hope to do it with 4 up and 4 down on Saturday.

[mhlr]

Awesome!! Looks great now, look forward to seeing the incline working on a vid

[SillyBilly]

Brilliant, I'm on the edge of my seat regarding the incline!

[ptlrcecil]

Looking forward to saturday.

[laalratty]

Following a request for more pics of the incline, today I gave in and dragged the camera out into the cold, along with the winding house and six slate waggons and took this lot.


Loaded waggons waiting to decend

The weight of the loaded waggons pulls the empties back up (although it didn't work so well today for some reason)

The loadeds can now be taken to the coast at Afonglas (well they could if the incline was connected to the rest of the railway!!!)
And finally...
To celebrate the new year, some of the local members came round for a little afternoon steam up.

And as LMSjools brought his Lady Anne, to finish the afternoon off we just had to doublehead them

[ACLR]

thanks for the pictures mate they were great

[SillyBilly]

Just what I wanted to see, thanks !

[SillyBilly]

I was thinking about the winding house troubles your having and was wondering whether it may be that the winding house is not far enough away from the incline?

[laalratty]

I was thinking of this myself, although of all the pics i've seen of real winding house they always seem to be close to the end of the incline. Might have to do some checking on the net

[pauly]

yeah but you cant scale down physics

[ptlrcecil]

yeah but you cant scale down physics

What!

[laalratty]

Not sure about the scaling of physics, but today the incline winding house was lowered slightly and also moved further back. I will take some pics hopefully later this week as the area looks a bit different now, although we havn't tried out the incline with the changes yet, so we don't know if it runs better.

[laalratty]

Well havn't managed to get the incline pics yet, but here are a few of other scenery projects on the ANLR
The First Signal

This is the Lineside Delights signal kit that I gave dad for christmas (I don't particualy like building signals or buildings so as I couldn't think of anything else to give him  :mrgreen: ) It took a couple of weeks for him to build and looked rather hard to me, however, it does look rather nice, although I can only think of one railway that had only 1 signal.
The Slate wall

This slate wall in front of the greenhouse has been under construction for some time, but it is finally finished, and is a significant visual improvement over the concrete block wall

Lastly, the final area of slate chippings has been put down in the quarry, this area has soil under the chippings and matting, so I will probably put in a couple of plants in the spring

[MTA]

That slate wall is absolutely fantastic. Great job!

I like the signal too, but they aren't for me on NG lines...

[SLRmidge]

The slate quarry is coming along nicely. Beautifully built signal, how many are you thinking of using?

[laalratty]

Not sure, I basically brought it for dad to see how easy it was to build, although dad has said that as we have one signal, we might as well signal the rest of the railway. This could be risky with the number of cats in the area where I live!

[SLRmidge]

Its miniature dogs you want to be careful of

[pauly]

yeah miniature dogs are a bad thing to have on a garden railway  :roll:    :lol:    

[laalratty]

Now then, I am about to do a post about something that is pivotal to our garden railways, but never usually talked about, even in garden rail. I wonder why...
Yes, i'm talking PLANTS!

Today I planted this lot in the new border around Ty Pren, 4 miniature trees, and 3 alpines. Here they are close up, including the lables with the names!

This conifer promises to grow to 75cm high, with a spread of 45 cm. Foliage is green in the summer but turns red in the autum and winter. If it does as it says on the label, I can see it easily adding to the scenic value of the Nant Llywyd valley.

Another tree, this a variety of the Chamaecyparis Lawsoniana, these are all slow growing dwarf conifers, many of which are great for garden railways and worth looking out for at the garden centre. This one grows up to 45cm high with a 45cm spread in 5 years.

This is a dwarf Hebe, found in the alpines section of our favorite garden centre, although it is actually a shrub (making this part of the garden a shrubbery I suppose  :roll: ). When fully grown, many Hebe's have small leaves, and do great representations of tree's or large bushes. This one I think will be in the large bush categorie, with a height and spread of 30cm. do be careful when looking for Hebes, check the height and spread as some grow to rather a large size!
If that didn't bore you too much, I will start another topic in sceneary about some of the other plants on the ANLR if people would like.

[SillyBilly]

A very interesting piece, I've always fancied some scale trees but I think my current railway is a bit to small and trampled on to make them viable.