Steam Age

The first two volumes of Mainline 2012 are complete:

V0l 55, Southern Locos is ready to ship, and I’ve just put a 6 minute excerpt on YouTube, showing Tangmere hauling the Bath & Bristol in December.

Vol 56, Great Western Locos is also ready to roll now. There are 2 excerpts on YouTube: Steam Railmotor on the Liskeard-Looe branch and Earl Of Mount Edgcumbe at Culross.

I’ve “remastered” Volume 28: The Great Britain II to produce a Blu-ray disc. When I produced the original, I cut the footage down to 90-minutes to fit onto a DVD without excessive image compression. With the greater capacity of Blu-ray, I’ve restored most of the missing footage and the running time of the Blu-ray version is a little under 2 hours.

“About time too”, you may well say! I’ve just finished work on the final three volumes covering 2011:

• Vol. 52, LMS Locos – Princess Elizabeth, Leander, 8F 48151 and a plethora of Black Fives;
• Vol 53, BR Standard Class 7 locos – Oliver Cromwell’s third full year on the mainline and Britannia’s first since overhaul.
• Vol 54, 3-Cylinder Pacifics – Duke of Gloucester, Tornado and Bittern running as Dominion of Cananda.

It’s now time to archive the files, clear the project from my NLE program and return to 2012 footage. Looking at the number of camera tapes my chums and I have used up, there’s not quite so much material to work through as the previous year. There’s some good stuff in there, though, including winter Cumbrian Mountain Expresses, summer Wemouth Seaside Expresses and Royal Duchies, Christmas Cathedral Expresses and more from our visits to Scotland in the spring.