Tuesday 17 April 2012

Greasers' Express

One of the joys of modelling a real location on a real railway is the chance to recreate the more unusual train formations with complete accuracy.

A train that we wanted to run on Bron Hebog at Sparsholt at the weekend was the WHR 'Greasers' Express'.

It is a works train which runs the length of the line, roughly on a quarterly basis, which halts at every junction, loop and station to apply liberal amounts of gloop onto all the point mechanisms.

Himself joins the gang whenever he can. On one of the recent trips the train was formed of FR van 51, a 'B Wagon' and 'Upnor Castle', miniature versions of which can all be found lurking within our colletion.



The only unrealistic part of this scene, of course, is that the train has been stabled on a bit of the WHR which no longer exists - this tightly curved bit of the siding at Beddgelert, on top of the old loco servicing pit, having been lifted in recent years.

One of the trips that Himself was involved in was filmed for a DVD produced by the FR's in-house team.



This video has proved invaluable to Himself during the recent spurt of construction activity on Bron Hebog.

Now, in order to double check some detail of the railway or the landscape around Beddgelert he has only has to pop the disc into the player rather than look through hundreds of photographs or, worse still, stop what he is doing until he is able to make a 400 mile round trip to North Wales.

This, and other DVDs about the WHR and the FR can be purchased online from the railway's shop here.

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