2016 Review : Books

I buy a lot of books, most rooms in the house have a book case in them and still i have run out of space. The loft is where a lot of books end up, plus i do throw away quite a few too. I get books on a number of subjects: railways and the military mostly. Back in the distant past my best friend and I used to buy huge amounts of military books. We called ourselves The Book Barons. Well we were young...

The best book i have bought in 2016 is "Night Trains of British Rail". Its a simple subject, photographs of the railways during BR days during the night. A simple subject but also a much changed and fascinating one. A different world of newspaper trains and mobile Royal Mail sorting offices. Its a really lovely book well put together, you should check it out.

Other highlights of the year's book buying have been "The Aldwych Branch", "Merseyside Electrics" and the Haynes book on the "VC-10".

Fiction wise i spent most of the year finally getting around to reading Len Deighton's Bernard Samson trilogy of trilogies. Many years ago i watched the ITV adaptation of the first trilogy and thought i needed to read this. Well its only taken me a few decades to get around to it but it was well worth the wait.

2016 Review : Music

Music is always a huge part of my life, but in 2016 something strange happened... i stopped buying CDs! Well i still bought a few but on the whole i bought mostly downloads. Which makes sense to be honest as 99% of the time i play music its on my Macbook. In the past i have bought CDs then ripped the songs to MP3 so i could play them on the Mac. In 2016 i just bought the MP3s instead. It saves money, saves a lot of space and saves time of course.

As for the music itself my love of neo-synth pop continued but my favourite artist of 2016 was the county singer Mary Chapin Carpenter, someone i have been a fan of since i was a teenager. Its nice to still have that link to the past. As always i do a playlist of some of the songs i liked most in 2016, and here it is.

2016 Review : Making things

2016 was a big year for making models, though making Airfix (other brands are available) models took more of a back seat to the model railway. Having successfully converted from HOe to N gauge late in 2015 i gradually built up my stock in the new gauge. Then in the Summer i built a new board to replace the old one dating from 2113. The modified layout works really well though it will be replaced again next Summer.

Late in the Summer i also built a smaller board to build a new layout for my HOe gauge fleet. This has been a bit of a test bed for the main layout and indeed i have largely started again with the layout over the last few days but thats fine. The best way to improve and progress is through making mistakes and learning from them.

There have been 6 Airfix models too. I have built a number of buildings for the model railway too, but time is the main thing i am short of these days. It might be a good idea if i do slow down with the models anyway as i'm fast running out of shelf space to put them on.

N gauge layout

HOe gauge layout

Harrier

2016 Review : Out and about

Every year on my old blog i used to review the passing year in December. Some times i did a month by month review of the year but i think this can be a bit boring, you want broad brush strokes with this kind of thing not fine detail. So to start... where did i go in 2016?

The answer is a lot of places! To be honest i hate staying at home at the weekend after a week of work so tried to go out somewhere every Saturday. As well as fairly regular haunts like Stratford-upon-Avon, London and Banbury i also broke new ground by travelling to places like Matlock, Portsmouth and Cromford. The Pompey trip at Easter also enabled me to go to the Isle of Wight which i only vaguely remembered from a holiday way back in my early childhood.

I also went up to Liverpool a number of times and explored places like New Brighton and Crosby (which was the first place i ever lived - though was too young to remember it). I've also liked travelling to smaller places in 2016 like Heyford and Ambergate. Basically if there is a railway station handy its on my list. I hope to visit many more places in 2017.

Portsmouth harbour

New Brighton

Chinnor

Cromford