Bills Posts

At one point today, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to follow my plans to visit Ron Lines, the Railway shop. But, in the end the change of plans worked to my advantage and the visit went ahead.

The manager (owner?) and his assistant were very friendly and extremely helpful. After a brief introduction I explained what I wanted and took the list from me and went with me around the shop pricing things up and where he couldn’t give a price explained why.

As you might expect the most expensive items will be the DCC controller and the engine, I knew that would be the case so it was no surprise to me.

There was no pushiness for anything and I was delighted with the visit. I will most definitely be going back to spend some money.

Our visit to the Watercress line last week has once more inspired me to look at my non-existent model railway. At this stage I have a very rough idea of what I want to do, but only the most basic idea of how to do it.

So tomorrow I’m going on a little adventure. There’s a shop in Southampton, Ron Lines, I am going to pay a visit. I should add, not to buy anything, but to look at the shops, and I am of course taking a list of what I think I need and I am going to see if I can price things up. I need to work out how much this is going to cost.

The main thing of course I think will be the digital control unit. The American model railway club here in Gosport (yes, oddly, they do focus on American railroads) use digitrax, so it is obviously a good system, but is it expensive? Does Ron Lines even sell it? All this will come out tomorrow.

The one thing I will comment upon; I do like to support the local exonomy, so my intention is to buy as much as I can from the local shop, but there may be things that I just won’t be able to justify doing. I wonder if they’ll have 2nd hand stock? It wouldn’t surprise me, it would be perfectly acceptable.

Let’s see how the day goes.

I got awakened last night, about 3AMish. It must have been a clap of thunder that did it. The lightning was quite strong, and I would time after each flash by counting the seconds, the claps of thunder were fairly consistently 4 – 8 seconds away. It went on for maybe half an hour to 40 minutes before fading away.

I couldn’t get back to sleep afterwards until nearly 6AM that is I didn’t go for a walk, to be honest, I just felt so tired.

When I got up I went and checked the rain gauge, 20mm overnight, that’s quite a heavy downpour.

Apart form the general dampness, it turned into quite a reasonable day.

Yesterday I wrote a kind of almost reasonable post and clicked on publish. I think it was probably about an hour later I suddenly realised that I hadn’t put a photo in. So, todays post contains yesterday’s picture. I don’t know why that happened, it just did.

I didn’t go for a walk this morning. Not because I’ve given up, definitely not. I had something I needed to do, and a walk just didn’t fit in. Unless it is bucketing down tomorrow, I will be back on the trail.

It’s only a few minutes before bedtime, and I am watching a couple of YouTube videos, the one I have on at the moment is done by a young chap called Teo. I think Teo is Austrian, as most of his stuff I think it shot there, but his English is very good. His photography is slightly unusual in that he takes pictures of what you might class as mundane things. He mostly shoots in film, but he does use digital.

i’ve spent part of the evening clearing off one of my work surfaces, the one under the window, even now I Haven’t finished but I have run out of steam and needed to sit down and do my blog, so at least you have something.

Out for my morning walk, I’ve started taking photos of the shops that have closed down on the high street. I’m not entirely sure why I am doing this, I think it may be something to do with my thoughts on revitalising the high street. Not that I have any plans mind you. I’ve found the website that gives the rateable value of the shops in Gosport. That’s quite interesting. Still not sure what I’m going to do with that.

I’ve also started watching the bus station, both old and new. I’m trying to work out what is going on at the new site. The picture clearly shows the trenches for the foundations of the new bus shelter and in the immediate foreground is what I think is called a terminus, the point where a bus will actually stop. It looks like the first one of several.

Behind it though, and obscured by the green barriers is a row of paving slabs positioned in a way that doesn’t make sense to me, so not sure what is going on there.

I shall keep an eye on it.

These wheels and levers are typical of the signalling infrastructure for the old semaphore signals. I confess, I have always found them fascinating.

When I’m at a railway station, more so on my own than when I’m with somebody, I like to walk the length of the platform. In the past I used to watch the cables and levers, waiting for them to move, and if there was a level crossing, I’d see if I could watch the man in the signal box spin the wheel to close the gates. I loved seeing the cables and levers move.

When I do finally get around to building my model railway I would love to have a set of signals set up to work the same as this, i think it would be really too difficult to set up, given the intricacies – I certainly wouldn’t be able build the interlocking that in real life prevents things from going wrong. I’m not even sure these things are available – I’m willing to bet though that somewhere someone has self built that kind of set up.

During our day at the Watercress Line Gala event, we thoroughly enjoyed the train trip form Alresford to Alton. We broke the journey at Ropley, the main engineering depot. I talked a bit about our visit there. I mentionned an angry little train, as in the header picture. it’s the little engine Kilmersdon. Every so often, Kilmersdon would burst in to life generate a lot of steam and rush off down the track.

It didn’t take me long to work out that this engine was being used to give visitors a driving experience on the footplate. What tickled me was the furious burst of activity as the train rushed off for a couple of hundred yards, and then slowly trundled back, letting off a second jet of steam.

It gave me a real feeling of the train being very annoyed at having to scuttle backwards and forwards. But, you can’t deny that the little green engine is very cute, and was lovely to see it giving so much joy to people.

Elayne found out a couple of days ago that the Heritage Railway The Watercress line was running a gala weekend. We thought we’d go.

We went to Alresford, my thinking was that as a paid car park, it was likely to be less busy than any of the other stations on the line. As it happens, that was the case, and we found a parking slot quickly.

It was fairly expensive – we hadn’t booked online, I did look but all of the slots were taken for today. But that was OK.

We had a lovely time, I really enjoyed seeing the trains, standing in the steam and smelling it and the smoke from the coal. I spoke to a few of the staff / volunteers, not sure which. They all love being there.

We got off at Ropley and walked in to a guided tour around the engineering sheds. Given that this is a volunteer outfit, they are doing a wonderful job, but as the guide was talking, it was obvious that all of these heritage lines survive through working with each other and an astounding amount of support from members of the public and some very wealthy fans of railways. Not only that, support is global – Did you know that the wheels of trains have steel tyres, and that these are only made (to order) in South Africa? No, neither did I.

Fascinating stuff. More tomorrow, featuring angry little trains.

This shows a small cargo vessel, possibly a tanker passing P&O’s Britannia which is on its way to Stavanger.

We were parked up down at GAFIRs having fish & chips, well actually sausage but you know what I mean.

It was the first time in quite a while since we last did this. Partly because it has only recently become a viable proposition with the increasing length of daylight. Very pleasant it was too.

Britannia was the second cruise ship we’d seen going out today, with the first being Aurora, quite a bit smaller than Brittannia, but still quite a neat compact looking ship.

A very pleasant hour.

The bell tower isn’t really leaning, it’s all in the perspective.

The 11th of May 2015 is the date when I first came up with my “Locality” idea, actually it’s a pretty feeble name, but it’ll do the job. What it boils down to is focussing my interests on the area where I live.

I used an app called Day One to write a fair bit of stuff about my idea of locality, I would have loved to have gone online back then, but I didn’t feel able to. I have really enjoyed these last three and a bit years of an online blog, and really do want to keep it going.

One way of doing that would be to reinvigorate Locality, which I confess I have let wither a bit. But, I intend to correct that. So, I am likely to re-join the Gosport Society, they have some good presentations at their events. I could even start going to council meetings again. I’ll look in to that.

But, the main part is exploring the local area. There are plenty of places to go, walks to do, and things to see.

So, let’s get on with it.