Sacrificial Victim

The railway has been on a bit of a back burner for a couple of weeks. Partly because photography has been taking up more of my time as I've made the effort to really get to grips, quite literally, with the Fujifilm XE-1. When using a camera with a lot of manual settings and overrides it takes a time for certain things to become second nature. There is nothing worse than missing a shot because you fumbled to find a setting.

I've also been quite occupied with a Tata Group wide competition for innovative solutions. I'm glad to say that my team won our European heat and we will be off to Mumbai in April for the finals. Anyone who thinks that the UK has forgotten how to invent and build things would have been very impressed by some of the engineering solutions coming out of JLR and Tata Steel that we were competing alongside. On top of that the end of the financial year at work is always a busy and stressful time for me as we calculate how all our hard work finally translates into revenue.

So I think I need to re-focus on a few projects. One of which is the Manning Wardle. Here is the sacrificial pug waiting to go under the knife.

Flicking through my copy of Manning Wardle Locomotives Volume 1 it appears that there were some 4ft gauge versions of the H class. Since the Tanat Valley connected with a 4ft gauge line you can probably see where my long term thinking is going.