The last few weeks saw the Wealden group forego our usual meeting in Uckfield and instead we attended the 2mm Expo at Wallingford. While Richard, Gareth, Dave and Guy enjoyed the layouts on show and chatted, I headed straight to Highclere to offer some extra stock to run and found myself runing the layout for a while. David, Alan and Bob also arrived at various points so we nearly had a full house.

With the Manor running nicely around Highclere, Pixie arrived with a large rake of coal wagons, so we proceded to do an ad hoc tribute to Pendon and ran the Manor extremely slowly with the huge train behind it. Julia took some video of this, but I haven't seen it myself. The photo of my Manor shows it running with the Worsely works toplights. Unfortunately the lighting seems to have confused the camera, so apologies for the odd hue.

Once away from the layout, I visited my best customer for Manor replacement chassis (he had theree!), Andy Carlson on St Ruth. I took a few photos of the black Manor on that layout and it was great to see that the chassis was working well when built by someone else. It kind of makes the development effort even more rewarding.

Back home the weather has meant that the occasional retreats indoors to keep cool have been quite productive. The turntable on Llangerisech has been painted, had the well wall treated with brick paper and the whole thing installed. For some odd reason it changes the look of that corner more than I was expecting, but certainly for the better when compared to the filled in version we've used when exhibiting in 1970's diesel mode.

Finally, a coal stage as per the one at Penmaenpool has been built and installed, so a couple of photos have been taken which I hope shows off the shed area to good effect. Next job is the water tower.