Earlier this year I finally got to see and ride on a steam locomotive that I had a small part in helping get built, Great Western Railway/British Railways 6880 "Betton Grange". I make no illusions that my annual contribution of £120 over the past 15 years materially moved the needle on getting Betton Grange built, but it was what I could afford and its meaningful to me to make contributions, even if small to support things I care about.

CN Train P276 rests at Aldershot yard on Sunday December 21, 2025 waiting to continue on to the VIA Rail Toronto Maintenance Centre. Talk about burying the lede? P276 is hauled by Union Pacific 8577 at the far end of the above photo, the cargo, is the first of three new Ontario Northland Siemens Charger-Venture sets for the return of the Northlander, the Toronto to Cochrane train cancelled in 2012 (See…

For no reason in particular since our honeymoon in 2014 I have slowly been assembling a full train model of The Jacobite that operates from Fort William to Mallaig in Scotland, aside from modelling the train with the LNER K1 2-6-0 62005 instead of an LMS Black 5 for haulage as we had. First up was a full on coach kit build (see…

Last Sunday I had friends over for an end of year/Christmas operating session at Liberty Village. I in full honesty have not run a lot of trains on my own this year, so I was decidedly curious to see how it worked under the control of others and to see what happened. I did run some trains through the week in advance to make sure things were plausibly working before torturing others!

Through the S curve at Moonlight. CPKC Train 105 (2nd) rolls west through the S curve at Moonlight in Sudbury.

Another small layout room project recently completed. A new longer HO/OO gauge test track that doubles as a nicer display track for a longer set of equipment. It is 59" long, just under 5' to fit the space on top of my workbench in front of the similar board project for my 7mm GWR models behind it. I bought a simple clear white pine board, cut to size, sanded, stained, clear varnished, and laid a length of Code 83 track on it.

Back in June my two brass steam locomotives returned from being painted and having DCC added. Since then they've been puttering about the layout when I've been running trains, but in an incomplete state. Both had empty coal bunkers in the tenders, and looked wrong as a result. I have friends coming on Sunday for a Christmas Ops Session and get together, so after work this week I got my act together and made coal loads for both.

Sigh, same number as last week as I missed a number a few weeks back. A sunrise shot for a dark winter day. GBRf Class 92 Numbert 92028 leads the Caledonian Sleeper "Highlander" from Inverness and Fort William through Harrow and Wealdstone as it approaches London Euston and its destination on October 21st.

Bytown Railway Society

Running behind this week! As the holidays approach, check your local museums and heritage railways for festive events. Here in the GTA, the Halton County Radial Railway is running their "Christmas on the Rails" events the next two weekends, December 5/6 and 13/14 from 1pm to 8pm both days. Details can be found here. If we get some snow it becomes a magical place as can be seen in today's photo of ex-TTC Snow Sweeper TP-11 and Rockwood station taken last December under freshly fallen snow.

You might think that between the left and right photos was a bog standard day at the paint booth...but I could only wish for that! I've been working on some resin boxcar kits from the now departed Yarmouth Model Works, in this case a pair of New York Central cars. I wanted to get them along together so I could use the same paint mix on them.

As the days get super short and winter closes in on us, one from last fall of an eastbound CPKC intermodal blasting out of the setting sun into the fall colours outside of Brighton.

I've had a good 2024/25 in terms of travel, with three trips to the UK, and all of them reasonably train heavy, though in very different ways. From our 10th Anniversary Trip that was train heavy visiting an old friend (LSWR 563) and experiencing Welsh Narrow Gauge for the first time, to The Greatest Gathering in August and…

Its that time of year again! The CPKC Holiday Train is commencing its run across the continent on an ever growing tour with the combined CP and KCS networks. The first official stop is tomorrow, November 19th in Montreal, and the last stop is December 21 in Vancouver. The schedule is here on the CPKC website. The two trains pass through Toronto, the "American" train first this Thursday with stops in Milton and Hamilton, and the "Canadian" next Friday/Saturday with stops in Bowmanville, Oshawa and Toronto on Friday, and Vaughan and Barrie on Saturday morning.

The last 24 hours of my short 5 day second trip to the UK was spent in London. After returning my rental car at Heathrow, it was onto the Heathrow Express to Paddington, and across the road to a Premier Inn right next to the station. From getting into the City at around 5:30 Monday, I had 24 hours until my flight home lifted off at 5:40 on Tuesday (recognizing that I needed to be back at Heathrow around 3pm on Tuesday to make sure I got checked in and bags dropped off).

Take two minutes to pause and remember. Today is Remembrance Day. As this post goes up at 11am, it is the moment of silence at Remembrance Day ceremonies, honouring the time the guns on the western front of World War 1 went silent. As I have written about before, my Great Grandfather served in the British Army in both the First and Second World War.

So what to do after three days riding trains at the Bluebell? Well, first up was to lighten my wallet with a trip to the Kernow Model Rail Centre in Guildford. After that, it was to a motoring and aviation museum that I have never had the chance to go to, the Brooklands Museum, home to one of Britain's first race tracks, and now to a retired Concorde.

By mornings first light. GO 564, an F59PH pulls the first train of the day into Kipling en route to Union Station, overtaking a CPKC freight that was slowing to a stop to allow the GO train to overtake it and move onto the south track the freight is on to get to Union Station.

Yeah, I know, its a bit of a humble brag to be writing about my second vacation to England in under three months having been over at the start of August for Oasis and The Greatest Gathering. This second trip came about because of a bunch of factors, not least of which the fact that I have been a member of the…