Rekindling an old romance

[Das Steinkopf]

Recently I came to the desicion to divest myself of my substantial LEGO collection and focus on traditional model railways, over the last 18 months I have been building up a sizeable fleet of Japanese N Scale rolling stock but this month I have also decided to re embrace modelling the Great Western Railway in OO Gauge. For over 15 years I was an avid GWR modeller until I got hooked into LEGO trains, now that I have been earning some money from selling my LEGO I have invested some of it into OO Gauge models, in particular two locomotives that I had always desired but were never available at that time, now my dreams have come true. I have always been a big fan of branchline and secondary mainline traffic, I love the look of smaller locomotives that seem to have more character than their mainline counterparts, the 45xx 2-6-2T Prairie was the quintessential branchline locomotive of the GWR and could be seen on passenger and freight services. The 32xx Earl on the other hand was a rather quirky looking beast for a design built in the 1930's, the Earl also known as Dukedog was a hybrid design utilising the Boilers off the 32xx Duke class and the frames of the 33xx Bulldog class locomotives, the result was a somewhat antiquated looking machine brimming with Victorian Era charm.

 

 

[railsquid]

FYI, for those of us watching in N gauge, the Dukedog has just been released in 1:148 by Union Mills, more worryingly I have discovered a couple were allocated to a depot (Tyseley for anyone taking notes) just down the line from the British bit of my layout.