Thanks to everyone who's posted their warm welcomes, its good to have such a sense of community here. As you'll see my choice of Avatar shows I wear my heart on my sleeve WRT my modelling.

It will take me a while to put together material for some posts on my layout, just back from travels in Japan there's a lot to catch up on as winter approaches.

In the meantime for anyone interested, on our Japan trip we used their excellent RailCard. Being a data freak here are some stats; we took the 21 day Green (1st) Car option and covered 4700km of which 3450Km were on Shinkansen. Railcard holders cannot use the premium non-stop Shinkansen so you sometimes just find yourself with an opportunity for some trainspotting:

https://1drv.ms/v/s!Au252AreD6BYmj15UDOMjAwnIxlY

here I was filming a stopping oncoming train when a Nozomi came thru at full tilt (270kph)

Our total travel was at an average of 121kph and in the whatever the class of travel we were in, ride and seat comfort were excellent with the sole exception of hitting a nasty headwind when on the narrow gauge local train thru the mountains to Takayama

Colin

The language is something I ca't get my tongue around Colin but those are 2 very impressive trains.  It must be that train travel in Japan is far more popular than in much of the rest of the world.  Their investment in railways must be enormous.

I should have included something about my layout in my intro, so, to fix that, here is a recent photo of my mythical Somerset village with just glimpses of some railway activity in the background. As I've never posted before on my layout, please bear with me as I pull various pieces together into a coherent story fit to present here.

Colin

Thats a very evocative shot Colin…captures perfectly a sleepy village lane. I do hope you are going to start a layout thread soon so we can enjoy more pictures like that
Best wishes

John