Later that summer, we travelled to the Czech Republic. We came up with another couple of layouts, but an unusually dark late summer meant that the filming was of such a poor quality that I decided against using it. I have however included a short snippet here:
Of course this would develop the following year into the Volumes 4 and 5 of the Longer Trains Series. Besides, there was also another layout, which we have yet to come back to.
We still hope to redo this, but in the meantime there would be no more upload until the next summer...
The next two uploads, in the Summer of 2010, would come from Burgundy. I had seen layouts on youtube based on a continuous loop going 4 times through Knapford, but 4 times in the same direction. We came up with a continuous layout going 4 times through Knapford, but twice in one direction, twice in the other.
The original orange TGV, with the empty Dijon mustard jar in the background, a not so subtle reference to Burgundy.
The bridge across the staircase was a nice original touch...
Liernais, the small village in Central Burgundy where this was filmed, lies less than two miles away from the very first TGV line, between Paris and Lyon, inaugurated in 1981.
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Almost as an afterthought, I then filmed another layout on the evening that we were leaving. No still pictures were taken, and I didn't get around to uploading it until October. I had bought quite a bit of extra rolling stock on ebay during the year, as I thought that the 1 or 2 trucks or coaches that came with the trains when bought new were always a bit insufficient. The "Longer trains" series had started, with the intention of eventually featuring every train at least once.
Somewhat unexpectedly, this has become our most popular upload on youtube at time of writing. There is a nice atmospheric quality about it that I still quite like though...
It was at that stage that we started to get serious. I had just realised that the light blue Tomy tracks could be had via ebay for a lot cheaper than they could in shops in the UK. In fact, it was around that time that they were replaced in shops by the light brown Trackmaster tracks, which seemed to offer far less scope for expansion, or of the type of expansion that we were after at any rate.
First upload from Svebohov, Czech Republic.
Filmed in August 2009, but only uploaded in March 2010. I had also decided that I would use a carefully chosen soundtrack for each upload, thus entering a minefield of copyright issues...
