(25-05-2012, 11:23 PM)bryony Wrote: Wow! That's impressive! I envy both your mechanical abilities (now, or when acquired) and how big your garden must be! (and more importantly, flat - my garden used to be the side of a railway embankment! )
I wish I was mechanically adept enough ( and had the machine tools to go with it) to actually build a steam loco, but I'm afraid unfortunately they will be bought in. The rest of it I'm fine with, I've been building models of anything you can think of since I was about 8 or 9. Actually anything that uses my hands, including dressmaking!
. Trains have always been my favourite though and in the past I've won national competitions in the smaller scales. As for the back garden, its about 50ft square so I potentially have about a 150-200ft continuous run ( one day, perhaps!). Yes the garden is reasonably flat, about a 2ft level difference diagonally across it, and I actually wish it wasn't so flat, odd as that may sound. In an ideal world, at least a reasonable length of it would be better at about waist height to avoid too much bending and stooping. Cutting it into the side of an embankment sounds ideal! FWIW, the piccy shows just about all that I've done so far!!!
Anyway, I think I've hi-jacked this thread quite enough now, sorry, so to drag it screaming back to somewhere near being on track ( pun intended!)
Two things that are related: one is that over the years, I've known and seen a sizeable number of T-folk who were into trains and modelling them, I have no idea why! The other, at a personal level, is that I used to find a conflict between model making and my T-side. I found that I simply could not build anything whilst I was dressed, it set up a horrible internal conflict which I never managed to either define or resolve. However I find now that the two sides of me can and do coexist quite happily - except it's a pain to have to take my stiletto's off to work in the garden!
I have to assume that it's another effect of PM allowing the balance between brain and natural hormones to settle to where it should be.