Garden Railway Forum

Our local feathered friends don't seem to have any appetite at all yet. The son and heir filled a peanut feeder before we went of on our travels and it is still full, even the squirrels seem to be giving the grounds a wide berth at the moment.
Bats on the other hand are all over the place.

I think we must have your birds here Jim.... my wife feeds them well and they tell all of their friends where the best restaurant around is sited....
We do have an amazing selection of birds visit us from tiny Wren to huge birds of prey. Diane regularly looks up new varieties which appear, some of which I have never heard of.
We do get bats too, but not near the house, except for the one which flew into the kitchen!

markoteal wrote: ↑Sun Nov 05, 2017 6:58 pm Did you get out - I ran 3 more trains today to keep the birds fed!

Unfortunately not , we had some friends round, then went out for tea. Will be hoping today to lay some wooden stepping blocks.

A few pics from todays Santa's Specials

Santa get's his own colour coded coach, nice!

Cheers Tom - Yes, he was happy to get away from hanging on the Christmas tree for rides on the Santa Specials at the CHLR as well as having a ride around the Kent 16mm Hopfields last week!

The coach in that livery sits well with your Millie.
Grant.

The colour of the coach livery is really nice and santa should be happy also.

Hope he didn’t get to tipsy. Great photo’s.

Have a brilliant Christmas and All the Best

A few pics from CHLR from recent activities:-

Firstly a pic from todays wood kindling freight trains - looked after today by steam power with Spitfire taking a load down to Junction goods yard Next a pic from Christmas Santa Specials - the big man about to set off up the line - its a shame you can't hear the chatter of the children in the coach ready for him to pop in with their presents at the first stop! And finally a little video of Santa on the move near BBQ End station

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2DIvRVtjp8[/video]

Lubberly!

Rik

Same here...very Lubberly...

HI Mark,

Lovely to see some more pictures of a genuine working railway.

Andrew

Soar Valley Light wrote: ↑Sun Jan 14, 2018 8:30 pm HI Mark,

Lovely to see some more pictures of a genuine working railway.

Andrew

Cheers Andrew - yes the railway is keeping up with kindling supplies which is a task at this time of the year - I have however had to concede on the bird seed flows to missing out the train supply on most days as the birds are just eating so much - I run a couple of token workings a week via train to keep the principle alive but on most days I'm out with the scoop filing directly!

I know the feeling Mark. Our birds are a bit fickle, sometimes the feeder hardly moves all day, others it's gone before my back's turned.

If demand is outstripping supply maybe it's time to rebuild as a double track line. The only other alternative would be to follow the example of Mountsorrel Quarry - lift the line and install a conveyor - that would be interesting in 16mm scale!

Keep the updates coming please, it's lovely to see your line at work.

Anbdrew

A Conveyor - now theres an idea!

Or perhaps a ropeway???????? - heres one in Sweden
By Arvid3D - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.p ... d=12024811

More than happy to share more working photos - maybe some bird seed workings at the weekend!

Now why didn't I think of that! We had one of those up the tip at Harworth Colliery. It was fascinating but a confounded nightmare. A lot of the pits used to have them but more reliable conveyors replaced them in the sixties. There were still detached buckets unreachably stuck in the middle of settling ponds at some pits. Ollerton was my favourite though, we were still sending the dirt up the tip by train in jubilee side tip wagons!

There's a working ropeway closer to home - this one supplies the brickworks at Claughton in Lancashire. No plans to close it either it seems, they replaced the cables last year!
Apparently the last surviving one in the UK?

There you go! I like they had to build a bridge to carry the safety meshing over the road

That's exactly like the one at Harworth pit! There was even a similar bridge where it crossed over the public highway (right over a crossroads). As far as I remember NO protection was afforded to the railway where the ropeway crossed the Glass Bulbs Branch. Maybe the fact that there was only one train a day to the aforementioned factory made the risk of not providing one acceptable.

Andrew