Today while my youngest had her afternoon nap and my wife looked for holidays we cannot afford I decided to go upstairs with my eldest and get in the loft and find something Chris swore was up there.
I never did find the Prairie tank Chris had imagined I had stashed but I found a few half baked projects and ideas that could be rekindled for the new layout. All the while Evie shouted up the ladder asking if the Christmas tree was coming down.
When Evie and I were back with the layout I took out my bulging box of ‘I will finish one day’ models and filled it up with the items from the loft that had now been promoted from ‘buggered it up/can’t be arsed to fix it’ box.
Evie then thought it would be a great idea to go through all of her Dad’s half baked ideas and lay them out like a sort of nightmarish graveyard scene of wasted money and deviant dreams.
While she was playing (what could possibly go wrong with a nearly 3 year old toddler and various sharp plastics, white metal and god knows what else?) I was looking at the layout having a think about what I could do next.
Then I get a ‘Daddy look at this’ and I turn around not to see a bit of a Dave Alexander tender kit stuck up her nose but to see a flat wagon and some bits of whitemetal laid out.
This wagon is a mainline flat I had changed the buffers on and given spoked wheels and was one day going to put a tub wagon or sorts on it as an NCB internal user before it had fallen in the ‘CBA’ drawer.
I saw what Evie had done and suddenly thought how great it looked. With my mojo recently lacking I thought that once the little blighter had gone to sleep I will do this model as she posed it and I must say I have felt a return of the mojo and a little admiration for my little modeller. So thanks Evie!
I think I will add a chain maybe or something similar when I have it but here, thanks to one of my kids, a nice little internal tool wagon.
There will not be much from me now as I am off to Wales and the Cambrian coast to drive class 158s for a couple of weeks on a training course. I will do a little travel log on my return. Narrow gauge steam to feature.
All the best
Oly
The Model Railways of Oly Turner and Chris Matthews 
Bravo Evie!
Very nice! I left my laptop unattended with this post up for a few minutes and when I came back my 10 year old Luke was checking out the pictures and said it was pretty cool.
Speaking of holidays probably can’t afford my wife has been planning a UK trip for 2018, hopefully I’ll get to include some trains! 🙂
Matt, whatever the lady is planning, if you need any guidance planning in trains let us know, there is a ton of stuff to see. Chris and I might even have a show on, what a blog link up that would be?! Oly
Definitely plan on it, I just figure it’s too far out to start planning anything specific (and we don’t have an actual date yet other than probably late summer/early fall 2018)
Neat story. Just makes me smile. The model looks really neat. I like it.
/chris