At last! FGW Turbos complete the picture

'Overjoyed' is not putting it too strongly. Anton Courtney is in the process of repainting Dave Babb's model of a Class 166 into FGW colours. With this, the modern-day image for my route is complete: until now FGW HSTs and Virgin Voyagers have been speeding past forlorn passengers at intermediate stations who are wondering whether their next local service is ever going to turn up. But Anton kindly gave me a sneak preview of his model and, as of today, the passengers (yes, I did say 'passengers') on my route can now have stopping and semi-fast services to and from Oxford. Having said that, we could still do with a Voyager in Cross Country livery. This is the difficulty with modelling the real world: it changes.

That's modern-day image. Step back 20 years and, with the kind assistance of Jon Bilton (there are an awful lot of decent people in the UKTS community), I've been able to do a repaint of a Class 119 in blue-grey livery, just how I remember the units as they trundled up and down the North Downs line past our house in Guildford. Apparently it's one of the top eight most downloaded files from UKTS over the past 15 days - people out there seem to be enjoying it. Jon has done a great job of plugging in some gaps in the first-generation DMU stable; I may have a go at helping fill some of the others. It's almost a cliche on the UKTS forum these days that MSTS1 still has a lot of life in it: speaking for myself, I feel as though I've only just got the hang of it.