"Shifting Sands is the name of my O9 (7mm scale, 9mm gauge) railway modelling project, an attempt to model a seaside miniature railway in a compact space of 3ft x 2ft, on a modified cork notice board....
I have always been interested in miniature railways, which I put down to visits to Fairbourne and New Romney in my early years! The idea of modelling one has been in my head for few years now, but progress has been slow, going through several changes in track plan and locale. Things seem to be progressing now though...."
I wrote the introduction above in October 2005 on the original shiftingsands.fotopic.net website. Regular readers of this blog will know that I started it sometime after the demise of the fotopic site as a means of showcasing new O9 projects. I don't think that there was ever a hope of the fotopic site returning and quite frankly I wrote it off as a loss. It would take forever to reassemble all the pages and how on earth would I know what I had written?
I then discovered that someone had been a lot more thorough than me in his recording of my work and had saved text copies of the Fotopic site pages. Step forward Mick Thornton, well known 'roving reporter' and photographer of all things narrow gauge in model form. From Mick's archived pages I am able to reassemble the pages, although each photo requires work to resize and edit as required. So from a seemingly impossible task it has become simply a lengthy one. The plan is to gradually reintroduce pages to the blog, where they will be found via the top right hand side menu, rather than as dated blog postings.
What the original site did not include was the background, planning and modelling processes I had gone through to get to the Shifting Sands concept, although bits of my thinking may have appeared on various discussion forums at the time. I have therefore added an introductory 'Path to Shifting Sands' feature to set the scene for the project.
Colin
