Symbolic Forest

Over some recent posts, I’ve been talking about how easy it would be to build a model of the Brecon & Merthyr Railway towards the end of its life, in N gauge. And specifically, how easy is it if you start with a train set? For one thing, I’ll need to have more than just one train to play with! But is it easy to get models of the right types of train in N gauge?

As it happens, there weren’t actually that many different types of steam engine used on the Brecon & Merthyr in the 1950s. Many trains were operated by pannier tank locos: now, there were multiple different classes of pannier tank engine, but given my train set came with one, I think I can put that to one side for now. What other types of steam engine were used between Brecon and Newport?

Firstly, there’s the Dean Goods, or 2301 Class. These were small 0-6-0 tender locos, with a pretty long life: they were originally designed in the 1880s, and lasted through until the late 1950s, specifically because they were small enough to run on a number of meandering Welsh railway routes with strict weight limits. Quite a few were requisitioned by the Army in both the First World War and Second World War, and ended up operating across Europe and in Turkey as a result.

Secondly, comes the GWR 2251 Class, a small 0-6-0 tender loco from the 1930s which was intended as the Dean Goods’ replacement. It was more powerful, but slightly heavier as a result, so didn’t quite have the same range that a Dean Goods did. Nevertheless, they survived until after the Brecon & Merthyr lines had largely closed.

Thirdly, the Ivatt 2MT Class, a lightweight 2-6-0 tender loco design from the late 1940s sometimes known as the “Mickey Mouse” classs. These were brought in to the Brecon & Merthyr from the early 1950s until the line closed; indeed, they operated on all of the lines radiating from Brecon.

You could, frankly, operate a realistic model of the Brecon & Merthyr in the late 50s using only the 2251 Class, the 2MT Class, and a pannier tank or two. If you want to go back a little bit earlier, you’d need a Dean Goods as well. There were still a handful of the Brecon & Merthyr’s own engines surviving at that date, but they were relatively rarely used on the Brecon line itself; you’d be more likely to see them heading up through Risca on the Western Valleys lines.

Moreover, N gauge models of all of these locos have been produced! The Ivatt 2MT class is, indeed, still available in the shops at the time of writing. The others aren’t, but it should in theory be not too hard for me to find them on the second-hand market.

In other words, with the right time period, this aspect of the model railway shouldn’t actually be a problem. Other problems will be much harder! I’m glad, though, that the project hasn’t immediately become too hard for me to consider. On, I suppose, to the next steps.

Keyword noise: trains, model trains, model railways, N gauge, Brecon & Merthyr Railway.

One issue with writing this blog for so long—especially given it’s not long since I had a hiatus for a year—there’s a lot of draft posts and ideas-for-posts that I’ve logged, and never done anything with. Write about The Mother being taken to hospital in May 2022, for example, which was overtaken by events when she died a few months later. Some of them I have no context on at all, such as writing about The History of Grimsby by Edward Gillett. Yes, it is a classic work of local history from the 1960s. No, I don’t know what significant or interesting things I had to say about it.

A more recent note, though, should be easier for me to turn into a post! About eighteen months ago, I noted “Post about Lego radio”. Which is nice and straightforward, because I took plenty of pictures whilst I built it.

Like a real radio, it does have a couple of controls: a “tuning knob” to move a needle against a frequency scale, and a switch which turns a sound brick on and off. The switch’s mechanism was both fun to build and tactile to fiddle with afterwards.

Alternatively, the back of the radio comes off, and there’s a Lego-build phone holder inside, so you can use your phone as a speaker. I dare say, if you have a Bluetooth speaker that resembles a phone in physical size and shape, it would sound even better. It can be rather louder than the built in sound brick too.

I have to admit, this was the sort of project where I buy it purely because I’m in the shop and feel like I’d be too disappointed to leave with nothing. It’s a fun little build, true, but not really one that, for me, is worth keeping on display. It comes back to the start of this post: given I found it a fairly routine build, why did I want to write a blog post about it? I honestly don’t know at this point, other than the ever-present sense that I should document everything I build. I did have a nice time building it, but I haven’t really thought about it at all since it was finished; very different to other Lego sets like the lighthouse or the Swiss Crocodile locomotive. Writing this does, at least, cross the idea off the list!

Keyword noise: Lego, toys, radios.

A week or so ago, I wrote about the train set I’d recently bought, as the nucleus of a model railway inspired by the Brecon & Merthyr line in South Wales. The train set is N Gauge, or N Scale. Is this, though, the best scale for me to build it in?

The term “gauge” means the distance between the inside edges of the rails, just as it does on a normal train. Model trains come in a huge variety of scales and gauges, ranging from those large enough to sit on, to those barely large enough to see. N Gauge was created by the Bavarian toy company K. Arnold in the early 1960s, and is named for the fact its gauge is nine millimetres—or neun Millimeter, I suppose. If I put a piece of the track that came with the train set next to a ruler, you can get a rough idea of its size.

Because it’s so small, you can fit more train into a tight space; that’s always been one of the reasons I’ve struggled to build myself a model railway.

Lots of trains are made in N Gauge, off the shelf; and train sets, like the one I bought, to give you an easy start. However, it’s not the only gauge or scale that’s roughly this sort of size. The other one, in fact, is even older.

N Gauge’s scale, for British models, is 1 to 148; or a fraction over 2mm of model to every real-world foot. However, since the 1930s, modellers had already been handbuilding models to exactly 2mm to the foot. It’s an extremely similar scale, roughly 1 to 152. Given the trains are so small to begin with, the difference is barely even visible. One pioneering 2mm Scale model railway built in the 1940s, the Inversnecky & Drambuie Railway, has survived and is partially on display in the National Railway Museum in York.

Unlike N Gauge, you can’t buy any trains or train sets in 2mm Scale. There is, however, a 2mm Scale Association who produce various different products to help modellers build their own 2mm Scale trains. A while ago now, I bought one of their “starter packs”, which includes a short length of track, which you assemble yourself from rails and a plastic base. It’s much more fragile than train set track, so I glued it down to a piece of foamboard and tried to make it look ballasted.

The track gauge isn’t 9mm, though; it’s 9.42mm instead. Very very close, but not close enough to run the same trains reliably. You can see it has much thinner rails; that’s because it tries to be an exact scale model of real track. For most of the twentieth century, most British railway line was made of individual 60-foot panels; so this piece of track is 12cm long as a result. 9.42mm is the exact width of real track, scaled down to 2mm scale; N Gauge, on the other hand, if you scaled it up to real life, would be about 10cm too narrow.

The question, then, is: which way should I go with this model? Go with N Gauge and trains I can just buy; or 2mm Scale and have to build an awful lot of stuff on my own. With the trains, at least, it’s possible to get N Gauge trains and just give them 2mm wheels; because as I said, they’re so close in size that few people can tell the difference. It might be an awkward, fiddly job though.

At the moment, I’m just not sure. Before things go much further, I’ll have to make a decision, and choose to go one way or the other. At least for now.

Keyword noise: railway, model trains, model railways, N gauge, 2mm scale.

A few weeks ago, I posted about how I’d finally made the decision to start building a model railway, because perfection is the enemy of the possible or something along those lines.

A few days later, a box arrived.

No, I don’t know why they sent such a big box, because the contents were much, much smaller.

If you want to model the Brecon & Merthyr Railway in the 1950s, Great Western pannier tank locos were extremely common. Conveniently, at the moment, you can easily buy an N Gauge train set containing a Great Western pannier tank, a couple of wagons, and a brake van to go on the back. Buying a set, with an oval of track and a power unit, means you bootstrap yourself: you can get everything you need to run one train in one box, even if all you can do is send one single train round and round in a circle. I’ll do a post explaining what “N Gauge” means at some point.

Some people might point out that the loco is in 1945-47 condition, but the wagons are in pre-1937 condition; lots of wagons never got repainted though, so really they just need to look a bit dirtier and worn-looking than they are. You might notice I’ve also bought myself a few more wagons, the well known “BR 16 ton” type. Over 200,000 of them were built in the 1950s, and they were ubiquitous on the railways from the mid-50s through to the early 1980s. The ones I bought come in pre-rusted condition from the factory, so they’re really more like a wagon of the 1970s, after the B&M had closed; but, regardless, they’re still appropriate for the train.

Ever since I was small, also, I’ve read model railway advice that says “never run your train set on the carpet! There’s too much fluff!” So, this is on our dining table, which is also nice and friendly on my knees. I deserve comfort, you know.

Naturally, I wasn’t satisfied with just a single circle of track. It wasn’t long before another box arrived.

The track is a different brand to the train set, but it’s all the same track gauge, and also, all the track is the same shape: the curves are the same radius, the straight bits are all the same length. You’d think it would all just slot together, wouldn’t you?

Well, it didn’t.

Although the track was all compatible on paper, the “rail joiners” on the train set track were bigger and chunkier than the ones on the extra track. The extra track didn’t have enough clearance, between the rails and the plastic base, for the joiner on the train set track to slide on.

If this was a proper model railway and all of the track was fastened down, I wouldn’t care about this. I’d just pull all the joiners off and replace them with thinner ones. Because this is still just a train set, which has to be taken apart again whenever we want to stop playing trains and play a board game instead, that wasn’t really an option. Option two was to replace all the joiners anyway, and just hope that the new joiners stay in place. It would have done the job, but it also sounded like a lot of effort. Option three: buy more track. The original oval of train set track went in the spares box, and I just bought myself an oval from the other brand instead.

With that done, though, we had something you could imagine was a little station. It’s not much station and you need a lot of imagination, but nonetheless, you can shunt your train about!

(This is a still from a video, so it’s a slightly blurry photo. Never mind that)

Where do we go from here? Well, there’s a few more things a full railway will need. More than one train, for one thing. I’ll post about that soon. For now though: there’s something extremely fun and simple about just being able to run your train round in a circle on the dining table, without really worrying about accuracy, authenticity, and anything else. Until we do need the dining table for something else.

Keyword noise: railway, model trains, model railways, N gauge, Brecon & Merthyr Railway.

Occasionally, over the past few years, I’ve mentioned how I’d like a model railway, but there are just too many interesting railways to choose from. In fact, I’ve always wanted a model railway. My father also always wanted a model railway, but never quite managed to do anything about it either.

This has led me to an interesting place in life. I’ve always had many, many plans for different model railways. I’ve tried to start building them, and I’ve never got very far, but the research I’ve done has been immense. On the actual railway history side, I know my stuff. I know my Bristol & Exeter from my Bristol & Gloucester. I know my Midland from my Great Northern from my Midland & Great Northern. I know why the Great Western Railway had LNER-style signals, and I know where the LNER ran in North Wales and why. On the modelling side, I know my theory too. I know why cassettes are better than traversers, and the difference between EM and P4. I know who Edward Beal was, and how his West Midland Railway wasn’t the real one. I know John Ahern created the Madder Valley, that Barry Norman doesn’t mean the film critic, and that Cyril Freezer has had his day. I know that dyed sawdust is a thing of a past, and I’ve admired Copenhagen Fields. I know the theory. I’m just no good at putting it into practice.

Like any skill, though, this is a classic chicken and egg situation. I’m just no good at putting it into practice, because I don’t try.

The answer to that, of course, is to just pick something and start. And nowadays, model railways have come on a long way from where they were when I was a small girl. There’s so much more that is either available to buy off the shelf, or has been at some point and can be found on the second-hand market. You just have to be judicious what you choose to build. If you want to model something from after 1950 or so, it’s much easier than something before around 1925, just because the amount of diversity in the railway network dropped dramatically following the creation of British Railways and the National Coal Board.

That means that building a model of, say, the Brecon & Merthyr Railway in 1905, would be difficult for a practical beginner, even though it would be incredibly interesting and different to most of the model railways out there. A model of the Brecon & Merthyr fifty years later, though, would be relatively straightforward. A few obscure local locomotives were still around, but most were fairly common Great Western and British Railways types. All the obscure little 4-wheel coaches the line had in 1905 had been scrapped and replaced with ordinary GWR ones; all the colliery-owned coal wagons with hand-painted lettering had been replaced with plain grey British Railways 16 ton ones.

With that in mind… I’ve bought myself a treat. I’ve bought myself a regular train set with a few extra bits and pieces, so I have enough there and then to at least get something moving and give me the inspiration to build more. Let’s see where it goes from here!

Update: To see where it did go from here, read the next episode in this saga!

Keyword noise: railway, model trains, model railways, Brecon & Merthyr Railway.

A few months ago, I wrote about my first exploration into the world of mechanical keyboards, and said, at the time, “am I going to turn into a keyboard nerd?” At that point, I’d found that mechanical keyboards can be extremely practical, that I found them much, much easier to type on than a cheap stock keyboard; but I was very wary of how keyboard nerdery can turn into something expensive and all-consuming. Frankly, I already have too many expensive and all-consuming hobbies. So. Did I succumb?

Well… sort of. It hasn’t become all-consuming, at least not yet. This, though, is how my desk looks now. Yes, that is another keyboard.

This is a slightly fake photo, I have to admit, because I’d never use both at once. The bottom one in the photo is the Keychron K10 chassis I wrote about previously, but with a prettier set of keycaps. The black pudding keycaps I bought were fine as a first set, but they weren’t really pretty. Moreover, the switches I’d fitted don’t really let enough light through for the translucent part of the pudding to work as expected. The shine-through colours were quite dim, only really visible in a darkened room. Because of this, the keycaps have been replaced by something prettier, a purple gradient set with blank tops.

Above is the new keyboard, a Royal Kludge 65% model in a pink and white colourway, with slightly less key travel. The reason they don’t normally come out together is: this is my new “travel keyboard”, small enough to fit into my work backpack alongside my laptop. It’s wired only, so I bought a matching pink cable to go with. It’s not too loud for office use, but it’s definitely eye-catching; so far I’ve hardly had a single office trip without at least one person asking me where I got it.

“Now hang on there cutie,” I can hear you saying, “didn’t you already talk about a smaller keyboard in your last keyboard post?” Well yes, I did. But as I said at the time, that keyboard is a 60% model. This one is a 65%, and that extra five percent makes all the difference. It means this one has dedicated cursor keys, rather than have the cursor functions doubled-up. In other words, I can code without chording. It makes my life much easier. Moreover, this one is lighter and less bulky in the backpack, due to the lower travel, and is slightly quieter and less annoying to colleagues. It’s also deliberately intended to go with a new-to-me laptop I’ve been playing with, a small pink model that used to belong to The Child Who Likes Fairies, which I’ve wiped and put Gentoo Linux on, so that I can use it as a small, lightweight laptop to use if I’m ever going to be forced to use a small, lightweight laptop for any period of time—in bed recuperating from anything medical, for example. I wasn’t completely sure how well Bluetooth would be likely to work with Linux on a random laptop, which is the main reason I plumped for a wired-only model.

Are there going to be more keyboard developments. Well… maybe. The blank top keycaps on the Keychron do have shine-through legends on the key fronts, which are a bit ineffective in the same way as the pudding keycaps were. The “clicky” switch I still have on the Insert key is a transparent-body switch, by pure chance—I found it in a friend’s spares box—and I can see what a big difference that makes to the shinethrough effect. Because of that, a set of transparent-body red switches and a keyboard rebuild might be on the horizon at some point; there’s no rush, though. Aside from that, though, I do have enough keyboards now, including keeping that first one as a spare. If I find myself tempted to buy more, I really should just sit on my hands.

Keyword noise: keyboards, mechnical keyboards.

For once, I have managed to continue on with the ongoing craft projects without starting any new ones for, ooh, must be nearly a couple of months now. Most of the crafting time has been devoted to the cross-stitch project I mentioned back in July. Despite a break for my holiday—because it’s too large to go in the luggage—I’ve got on quite a way with it. Here’s the progress to date.

It’s quite hard to take a decent photograph of, because that black background greatly confuses any camera which attempts any degree of automation. Maybe I should try telling them to use Night Mode.

Keyword noise: crafting, sewing, cross-stitch, current projects.

There are still numerous craft projects somewhere in mid-flight at Symbolic Towers, and I keep slowly gathering plans for more that I haven’t even started yet. I have enough crochet patterns to keep me crocheting for several years, probably; a very large cross-stitch under way, and several other cross-stitch kits ready to start—and that’s to say nothing of the Lego or the model train kits. None of these things, really, have been posted on here, largely because I think “I’ll save them for YouTube” and then never video them either.

Despite all that, I’ve just started yet another cross stitch project!

What’s exciting about this project, the reason why it’s using up most of my crafting energy at the moment, is that: for the first time, this isn’t a kit. It’s not even a pattern I’ve bought and then found my own materials for, like most of the crochet projects. No, for the first time, this is a pattern I created myself. I saw something I thought would make a good cross stitch project, turned it (with the help of software) into a chart, and got started.

Because this isn’t something that was designed specifically for cross stitch by a specialist cross stitch designer, it does use quite a lot of colours, and it’s going to be a bit more complex than pretty much all of the cross stitch kits I’ve tried so far. Because of that, for the first time, I’ve actually started crossing off each of the stitches on the pattern as I do it—it helps that I know I can always print another copy off, of course. It is definitely going to help the further into this I get, though, especially when I get to the parts of the design which include lots of small areas of different colours, or the parts with lots of confetti—the cross stitch term for single isolated stitches scattered one-at-a-time across the background. This project will have a lot of confetti.

It will be some months before the whole thing is finished, even though it’s not full coverage, and even if I did deliberately avoid including any backstitch as part of the design. For now, though, new project energy is carrying me bowling along at pace. Only a week in, and already I’ve done a good chunk of the pattern’s central, focal point.

That’s quite a good chunk of stitching for one week’s spare evening moments. What is it, you ask? Well, to know that…if you don’t recognise it, you’ll just have to wait and find out.

To read the next post about this project, follow this link

Keyword noise: crafting, sewing, cross-stitch, current projects.

One stereotypical nerd gadget I’ve never seen the point of, that I always assumed was the nerd equivalent of hand-woven gold hi fi cables, was the mechanical keyboard. I assumed they were, as the phrase goes, fidget spinners for IT geeks. Something that is expensive and makes lots of fun clicky-clacky noises, but doesn’t actually change your computing experience by one tiny bit.

Well, reader, I was wrong. I admit it. Completely, absolutely, 100 per cent wrong. Switching to a mechanical keyboard has been one of the best productivity improvements I could have made to my workplace. Since I started using one, my typing has speeded up enormously. It’s definitely not just a toy. Having a decent length of travel on each key movement somehow genuinely makes it much easier and quicker for me to type; and also makes my typing a lot more confident. I’ve never learned to type properly, and I still make a lot of mistakes, but in general I’m finding my fingers skip across the keys much more freely.

This first started last summer when I was already tempted by the idea, and saw that a fairly cheap model already had been reduced quite a lot on sale. So, I bought it. And, if nothing else, it was pretty. It glowed, with rainbow light. It came with a choice of beige or purple keycaps, so being contrary I naturally changed just half of them over, trying to get a dithering kind of effect from beige on the left to purple on the right. It kind of worked. Typing, though, was excellent.

I felt like I was typing much better than I ever had on laptop keyboards, but there was something wrong. Still, I resisted the temptation to be a keyboard nerd. An enthusiast. One keyboard would be enough for me.

The problem with the first keyboard was that it was only a 60% model. In other words, it only has about 60% of the keys of a “full” PC keyboard; just the core letters and numbers really. To get all the other functions, you need a modifier key. A lot of laptops do that to access extra functions or squeeze all of the keys into a laptop case, but this was using it for fairly basic functionality like the four cursor keys. When coding, I find myself moving around with them a lot, so having to chord to use them quickly became annoying. On top of that there were other little problems: the Bluetooth connection would sometimes glitch out, particularly if the battery was low. When the battery ran low the only warning was one of the modifier keys flashing, and then when you charged it up there was no sign of how charged it was. On the good side, its small size made it nice and portable. Overall, it was a good starter.

After a few months, I’d decided it was time to think about buying a full-size mechanical keyboard. And why not go all in and just buy a “barebones” model. A barebones keyboard is, well, not really a keyboard at all. It’s the core of a keyboard, but it doesn’t have any keys. You have to fit it out with keyswitches and keycaps for it to work. When it arrived, it was very nicely-packaged, it felt very substantial, solid and heavy, but I couldn’t actually start using it.

It’s a Keychron K10 model, and all you have to do to get it working is push switches into each of those sockets. You get to choose the brand of keyswitch you want, though, and switch manufacturers publish complex charts of the response and movement of different types of switch, describing them as “soft”, “firm”, “clicky” and so on. I just went for a fairly soft switch from a well-known brand, and set to work plugging them all in. It was quite a therapeutic job, pushing each switch home until it is firmly in place.

The harder part is choosing the keycaps: harder, because as well as how they feel, they have to look pretty too, and there are an innumerable assortment of manufacturers who will sell you pretty keys. And in the end, I just couldn’t decide, so went with a set of plain black “pudding” keycaps. “Pudding” keycaps have a solid, opaque top but translucent sides, so the backlights on each key shine nicely through. I’m not sure they are the right keycaps for me long-term, but they were a nice and cheap “first set”.

Am I going to turn into a keyboard nerd? Well, I’ve already tweaked it a wee bit. I kept hitting the “Insert” key by accident, not being used to having a key there, so I’ve already changed the switch on that specific key to be a much firmer, clickier one, so that at least when I do hit it by accident I notice I’ve done it. I’ll probably change the keycaps for something prettier at some point, something a bit more distinctive. I’m not going to go out and buy a lot more keyboards, because I already think this one is very nice to type on. It has a sensible, useful power lamp that flashes when the battery’s low, is red when it’s charging and goes green when it’s finished. But, overall: I admit I was wrong. This is much, much nicer to type on—I’m writing this post on it now—than a standard laptop keyboard is. For something I’ll use pretty much every day that I’m at home, it’s definitely worth the money.

Keyword noise: keyboards, mechanical keyboards.

The crafting project I mentioned in my last post is finished! Well, aside from blocking it and framing it, that is.

Me being me though, I couldn’t resist immediately starting two more. And then, of course, there’s the videos still to produce. I will get to the end of the list, eventually. In the meantime, here’s some photos of a few of the things in progress.

At some point, I promise, all of these projects will be complete and will have videos to go with them! Better make a start…

Keyword noise: crafting, cross-stitch, sewing, trams, Lego.