Project X

A recent comment on an old post reminded me that I have a few ideas in mind for what to do with the Apa box after I dismantle the current diorama.

Most of them involve trams in some form or another.

This Lisbon tram is sat on the track at the moment. Strictly speaking it is sat between the racks because it is a nominal 12mm gauge out of the box. I quite like trams in rural settings, or better still the locations where an urban line becomes a rural one. So my project X involves such a transition, and the X itself  is also an important part of my putative tram layout design.

Incidentally whilst I was writing this my eye was caught by a photo sticking out from one of my father's old tram books that I inherited.

I know it wasn't taken on his garden railway, although that did see the odd tram operate on it. It appears to be a commercially produced photograph taken in 1959

Tramtastic

I have a soft spot for trams, despite suffering the privation, when very young, of getting my short trousered legs sand blasted whilst waiting at Leyburn Avenue tram stop in mid-winter when waiting for the tram to school, and then being sandpapered by the moquette seating.

My father was an early member of Crich, and also, as "Finister's International of Coventry" did his bit to help promote small scale tram modelling. My grandfather was a tram conductor, and my great grandfather first moved the family to Birmingham to work on the steam trams. A great uncle met an untimely death when the brakes on the tram he was driving failed.

One of the ideas I've considered for the spare APA box is something based around the Kinver Light Railway, either a "proper" model in 4mm or a pastiche using the Smallbrook Studios Brill car, one of which is waiting to be assembled in the projects box.

I've already mentioned Crich and on a fairly miserable Easter Sunday this year Issy and I popped up to go to their April 1940 event. Like many of these wartime period events a lot of the costumes seemed somewhat anachronistic and untypical . The Home Guard parading in urban Britain in April 1940 is believable, lots of over-aged for combat duty GI's and their anachronistic Jeeps aren't. Before I get too picky though I can be accused of the same sort of faux authenticity with the photos I took.Incidentally the majority of these were taken with my phone.