Garden Railway Forum

I thought I would share this with you all be it rightly or wrongly.

An engineer turns up at my place of work to upgrade 3rd party software for a particular brand of machinery used at my place of work and neither myself or my boss who is currently working at another site in a different country are aware of the upgrade. Anyway, I invite the engineer in while I check with the departmental manager of the machinery his work will impact and he had booked him in weeks ago (the manager mentioned is new and did not realise the engineer would require IT to get access to the systems that run his machinery).

So all the work I had planned for today was gone to poo while I settled to spend the day baby sitting this engineer. As we got talking I discovered he had a hobby interest in IT so I showed him the infrastructure changes I had made since joining the company as he had visited the site I work at many years ago before I joined. He then met someone in one of the teams in the office he remembered and they started talking. Their conversation then went on to train's to my surprise where my office colleague mentioned to the engineer that I was also interested in railways.

Turns out this engineer enjoys building 5" gauge trains with a fully kitted out workshop at his home. His brother though has been looking to find a coal fired loco he can use in his small garden. I showed the engineer the build thread and YouTube videos of my coal fired Riverdale loco 'Smokey Sophie' and he was very impressed.

We have now exchanged email addresses and I have offered for him and his brother to visit my house to see my locos in action to see if this would interest them into garden railways.

Not my usual day at work but a pleasant one nevertheless.

Good grief there must be something in the air at the moment.
I called over to see a colleague last night in a neighbouring parish about a couple of things. This chap is known for being quite ferocious and I wondered why he had invited me to his house rather than conversing on the telephone. It turns out he is a model railway enthusiast, had heard that I was and we spent a happy few hours playing trains on his fair sized 00 gauge layout.

I am glad to hear that your day that seemed so destined to vanish down the kharzi was saved.

Railway enthusiasts come out of your closets, you have nothing to loose but your anoraks.

and your tartan flasks!

It’s the same with all our hobby’s is it not. When I was doing the N Gauge stuff I was organising a get-together at the local store and when was asked what it was for, a member of staff said, “Oh Simon does trains too”. Turns out he only lived 3 doors down. He has since moved but we had many a great running session at both our homes.

Just before I retired, my immediate boss was asking what I did while I was off work during my convalescence, I said I was building my new layout, he then said That’s great Rod, I also do N and OO too.

We had only been working together for 7 years

Strange how these things happen. I have been working at the same place for 15 years and found out only 3 years ago that one of my team's husband had a 32mm garden railway, in the same village, about 200 yards away...needless to say, we're now mates!