Merry Christmas, Yes I know its early.

As I wait to see a neurosurgeon in a couple of weeks, along with most of the outside work being very much completed, my focus has turned to the layout, and sorting out of items, the restart as I had posted earlier has not progressed beyond that point as yet, but I look forward to the time between the surgeons visit and getting a temporary sheet of MDF up to mark out the sky and background area that will be painted.

Since the last bit of work, I have been slowly unpacking boxes, and sadly some items have not survived well, the roundhouse has a damaged side wall that will need rebuilding, also parts of the Orange based coal stage have broken, attempts to fix it have not been too successful either, as such I was looking at some styrene and timber purchases, today, as I move among the boxes and containers in getting things lined up, (sometimes I can be methodical) I found a container on the top of several marked   Sundry Layout items, on opening the container and finding some lost items near the bottom was a large plastic bag full of packs of styrene packs along with a number of North Eastern wood strips.

Therein lays the whoopee of Christmas coming early, as I now do not have to search and buy replacement styrene or wood for spares.

As an aside to all of this, I am working on a post that may or may not be of particular interest to many of you who follow Essence blog. I am hopping to add some posts that may help in regards to some different areas of the NSWGR in the steam era.  This coincides with a degree of research I had done previously as to the tight era that I have chosen to model, that being 1955- 1957/ very early 1958. Reason being that it makes me very much directed in what I purchased and will in the future prevents me being tempted outside that era.

In Byways of Steam #26, Ian Dunn put an article that was in an area that I am particularly interested in, and that is on Numbers in Font design.  This topic is something that I have been looking into for some time, it comes as a result of my time on the railways, also when I have looked at some of my own photo's along with those in books.  For me, I find that having a good collection of books that cover the modelling era I am working in, provides a heck of a lot of information that helps in having a relatively correct layout with models and their details..

I hope this topic is of interest, and as a starter please take note of the front end photo I took of 3812 at Enfield Loco #1 shed departure road in 1964, and the font and positioning of them