Wales Trip 2025: Day 3 – Rosslare to Fishguard

Having somewhat recovered from our jetlag we arose at an early hour to walk down to the ferry terminal to catch the Stena Lines ferry to Fishguard. The ferry offered a cafe that served breakfast but closed not long after departure. There was a full hold of trucks but the passenger deck was sparsely occupied. A weekday trip in May is clearly not what the facilities were designed for.

We arrived in Fishguard well before check-in time at the pub! but were able to drop off our bags and spend the day wandering over to the twin town of Goodwick and back. We had lunch in the Fishguard station café and I managed to catch one of the trains coming from the ferry terminal station.

Our acquisition of books started at once as per our habit with a book on birds since there are several varieties of corvids hanging about and we had no idea what to call any of them. They can’t all be “crows”.

If the greenery on the embankment wasn’t enough of a “not in Canada” moment, the general front garden enthusiasm was evident.

Adapting Comstock Road

Although it has spent the better part of 3 years stored in pieces, I still have Comstock Road and the intention to complete it. As a New Years’ challenge inspired by Trevor, I set it up along the available wall in my workshop, found the boxes of rolling stock, and ran a short train. All worked gratifyingly well considering that I did not even clean the track. My efforts in the original construction prove durable.

However, the aforementioned available wall is not long enough to the layout as originally designed at 146″. I am about 17″ short of space for leaving it permanently set up. I need to come up with a plan.

Design Goals

  • Be able to leave something set up so that I can work on it and able to run a train without special effort.
  • Preserve as much of the existing trackwork as possible.
  • Not have the layout exceed the available space.

Here is the latest layout plan as it stands.

For design purposes, both ends are assumed to be bounded by walls. Traverser side is not yet so bounded but it will be in the hopefully not to distant future.

Alternatives

I have not made a decision but I find it worthwhile making a list of the possibilities.

  • Scrap the lot and build anew.
  • Make no modifications, work on the layout in any two sections at a time, set up elsewhere to operated.
  • Lop off the required 18″ to make the layout fit. It could be 12″ (1 car length off the traverser end and the remainder off the other. Taking it all off the traverser would reduce it to 1.5 cars.
  • Build a second, shorter traverser section for home use and keep the existing traverser section for show/deployed use.

My current fancy favours the second traverser implementation. Perhaps a cassette based fiddle yard instead to compensate for the lesser head room? I do need to do some careful measurement and see if the 12″ off one side, 8 off the other would produce a still workable plan.

Just for fun, here is Comstock Road in its new home. You can see the extent of the length problem at lower left.

Wales Trip 2025: Day 2 – Dublin to Rosslare

I have decided I need to systematically title the trip posts. Let’s see how that holds up.

We ended an extended period of wakefulness at a guest house in Rosslare, County Wexford. The harbour is a busy place although not nearly so extensive as the one in Dublin. Our ferry departure was a some ungodly hour local time so we wanted to be in walking distance of the terminal.

We learned that the foot passengers do not embark or disembark on foot but do so via shuttle bus that drives between the passenger terminal and the hold of the ship. This means they do not have to faff about with ramps or keep random civilians from wandering in front of a truck.

Other than arriving by rail, the whole ferry terminal was developed by the railroads including the Great Western in conjunction with their rail businesses. There is still rail service to Fishguard which was our next destination.

Dinner was snacks from Murphy’s SuperValu because we were properly jet lagged.

Leverage, Eventually

On my bench and on my mind is the first of 3 Shropshire & Herefordshire Area Group ( S.H.A.G. ) lever frames. I expressed an interest in fabricating the locking tray for Trevor Marshall’s Bydemill 7mm layout and soon found myself in possession of three kits due to Trevor’s enthusiasm. I am slowly working my way through them while re-learning the art of soldering.

I have reduced the supplied etch from 5 levers to 4 and will do the same to the other two. Two will be ganged together for an 8 lever frame and connected to the locking tray.

My New Year’s resolution is to get these all completed without further delay. Wish me luck.

New Places, New Trains: Wales Trip 2025

Last May, my wife and I finally took a big trip to Wales via Ireland. What with the pandemic, family needing support, renovations and moving, the expected retirement travel has been slow coming. Water fowl linearly arranged, we set off for an epic(for us) 3 week jaunt.


It turned out the that the shortest and least expensive way to get to Wales was to fly from Toronto to Dublin and cross by ferry. We chose to go in via the Rosslare to Fishguard route which meant taking a shuttle bus to George’s Quay in Dublin and a train from Tara Street station to Rosslare Europort.


My collection of photos is uneven but I will share some highlights in separate posts but, yes, there will be more train photos. We travelled mostly by rail and bus. I look forward to a return trip to see some of the places, cough, trains, cough we didn’t manage to fit in as well as a more lingering stay in Ireland.

New Year, New Home, Same Old Guy

It has been (checks notes) 3 and a half years since I last posted. I’m not just over the hill I am clearly picking up speed on the down slope! 😀

Much has happened in the interim, very little of which has been active modelling as I wandered off into model engineering, streaming, woodworking and moving house. Sometimes all at once. I have done some things but had lost the habit of writing them up.

Our household has decamped for a village with a 3 digit population from a city with a 7 digit one. Massive amounts of renovation and side projects later, I finally feel like I have things to write about again. Hopefully there will be a flurry of catch up posts to follow.

A New Start(er) for the Myford

My Myford ML7 lathe came with the motor and a plug for a light hardwired into a metal electrical box with standard household switches. It was also mounted out of sight around the side of the stand. For machine tools, this is not the best arrangement since one could easily (and often) turn on the lathe when aiming for the light or vice versa. There was also nothing like an emergency stop. I could stop the spindle with the lath clutch but not the motor and drive belt. A less likely danger would be for the lathe to restart after a power failure if I forgot to turn it off after the power went.

The proper solution for all of this is a magnetic motor starter made for the purpose. I bought a relatively inexpensive one from a local supplier and searched the internet for wiring instructions. The instructions intended for wiring one from scratch were intimidating to say the least. I set it aside for later.

After an somewhat related household DIY success (replaced the contactor in our A/C unit), I was inspired to have another look. Fortunately, this time I found simple instructions that covered the basic connections I needed to make. I figured I was most of the way there!

Getting the box wired was easily accomplished and the test run produced no release of magic blue smoke or other disasters. Getting the wires properly secured to the box and the box mounted to the stand turned into a real project. Admittedly, some of this was because I didn’t want to move the lathe or remove the previously installed drawer unit to improve access. This resulted in drilling and tapping mounting holes while sitting underneath the workbench, an activity many model railroaders are familiar with.

After a bunch of fiddling, fitting, fettling and faffing around, I finally got it all done to my satisfaction. I now have a prominent big red button to stop the lathe just like the milling machine has. Hopefully I will never need it on an emergency basis.

Right On the Button

In my last post regarding the saga of the part of many attempts, I mentioned my intent to try an “old school” technique for rounding off the ends of the part. The obvious approach would be to center up the part on the rotary table and mill the ends. This has challenges. The small size of the part makes any error in centering very obvious, holding on to the part while still getting in there with an end mill is tricky, and so on.

I was especially leery of messing things up at the final stage for what is a cosmetic feature so I elected to go with hand filing. I am no master of the file so just marking out the curves and having at it was not going to produce a satisfactory result. Enter the filing button. Filing buttons are a form of filing guide that provides something to file up to centered on a hole. Other filing guides can be used for more elaborate repetitive shapes but all I needed was a circle. One usually makes the guide out of a harder material so that the workpiece goes well before the edge of the guide.

I made a pair of buttons out of O-1 drill rod since that is much harder than brass. I could have heat treated the results to get something that the file could not scratch but this is a one shot use and I wanted to avoid extra wear on my file. I made a pair with matching center and hole so that I could clamp the forks of the workpiece in the vise and not bend things.

After dropping and finding the button parts several times, it was just a matter of filing away all the bits that didn’t look like a rounded end. It probably took me three times as long to make the buttons as it did to use them but I found it relaxing to use files because there was little to no chance of a catastrophe. I am pleased with the end product and even enjoyed making it. Onward (finally) to the next part!

Machining Over Macramé

After various delays both actual and mental, I have gotten the latest attempt at The Problematic Part(tm) past the previous failure points. Here is the rogues gallery of most of the attempts (I might have pitched one or two) with the success to date on the right.

The items can be roughly categorized as misread drawing, mysteriously misaligned, utter brain fart and so far, so good.

I am actually looking forward to the final step for this piece because I am going to try out an old school manual technique for rounding the end.

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