A couple of weeks ago I picked this up from a friend with an offer to build it for them. The reason being ‘why not?’ It came about as three of us looked at one of his layouts and with a little bit of wire tracing, got the points fired up again which was on hi ‘to do’ list. Once that happened it was one of those spurs to look at other quick wins for the layout, and there were a couple of wagons yet to built. To be honest I quite fancied building it, as it’s a while since I’ve put a kit like this together. I do have other projects underway in terms of kit building like the Parkside hoppers below, those just needed a set of wheels and one end moulding sprue that had gone AWOL over a few years of storage.

The Cambrian kit is for a D664 10 ton van, and is a very simple kit, I’ve not counted but there probably only 30 parts or so, It is of its age though, and perhaps a little crude by contemporary standards, especially when we see the quality of 3D printing and how that has improved. The neat thing about the kit though is it’s simplicity, the top picture was around an hour or so’s work, but the pleasure of getting the body square, and sitting it on the chassis, was a real joy.

Also looking around his man cave there was a simple operational fiddle yard that took my fancy. I’ve started working on my Forest of Dean system layout, and a recent purchase of some boards that were available will likely accelerate the first stages. The yard above however had me thinking, the end of the line that I’m going to be doing is Lydney Docks and looking at the simple point actuation above had me thinking along similar lines rather than electric points as the simple method also includes frog polarity switching, which for me is a key element, especially with short wheelbase locomotives.

The above boards are two of the batch that I’m refurbishing for the project, its quite labour intensive cutting back the paint off them and preparing the surfaces, I also want to raise the track bed off the main layout deck, so I will have to cut access holes to place any point motors in a way that I can access them for any maintenance or replacement. These will be part of the fiddle yard area and I’m minded to have a sort of a compromise in scenic terms, in that the fiddle yard may well be partially landscaped with scenery, Lydney may well be a pastiche or more realistically, not a meaningful visible replication of the docks, but will reflect the unloading of coal at the right place in the system. Theres still a good bit of planning yet to do as regards the system, but these, and the other boards that came with them will likely make the end of the line, and getting that bit right, will paradoxically be the beginning of the rest of the system!