Here we are in October, the clocks have just gone back, the nights are drawing in, the loft gets ever colder and glue takes longer to set. Here’s what we got up to in October.
Dorking and Horsham Model Railway Exhibition at Dorking
A quick hop over to Dorking for a few hours on a Sunday morning at the start of October took us to the Dorking and Horsham exhibition – a much smaller exhibition that we’ve become accustomed to. A single hall of layouts and stands, our friends at Roxley Models being the only trade stand along side a few second hand stalls. Layouts and stalls arranged round the perimeter and a single central island, with one side almost entirely occupied by the West Sussex N Gauge MRC 4 track modular layout – that they’re taking to Germany later in November.
Various club layouts were present including a handful of visiting layouts, our own club layout, Whitmoor had an outing and the lovely Kinenchenbau by Iain Morrison all operating under the watchful eye of iTrain – always a pleasure chatting with Iain.
Great Electric Train Show
On the Sunday we all pilled into the car and headed up the M1 to Milton Keynes, dropped the girls in Milton Keynes and then headed to the Marshall Arena for The Great Electric Train show. This was the first time we’ve attended the show so didn’t know what to expect. Parking was relatively easy, it’s a big site with lots of parking but it was confusing whether we were parking in the retail parking or somewhere else, we made sure to give our plate in to the lady at the arena on arrival and we’ve not had a parking ticket through yet so fingers crossed! There was no queuing for ticket holders but even when we went out of the venue for lunch there was still a line of people waiting to get in.
On entering the hall you were immediately next to Pete Waterman’s Making Tracks – it wasn’t until about 3pm that we returned to even get a look at the scenic side of it – 157ft long! It was quite a sight – the post show briefing video they published https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-foew8KbQuI certainly covers all of the pain they experienced getting it there and working!
Towards the end of the day we headed over to look at Making Tracks and ended up having a very nice conversation with Pete Waterman. It was briefly interrupted by a gentleman trying to say that the Jubilee class (forgive me, I’m not a Steamy) did more heritage work than the Flying Scotsman, which Pete protested:
…I am the only living owner, sole, all the rest are dead, I know exactly how hard it works, it works harder than any other preserved railway engine does
Peter Waterman, GETS, 2023
Other conversation points included, should you put a scrap yard on your layout just because you can and have space – no probably not! Pete was saying the Making Tracks 3 Milton Keynes station is 16ft long, in N Gauge that would be 8ft, and nodded towards James Street (22″ x 12’9). I think he thought it was too busy and not realistic. Less is more seems to be the takeaway here.
Speaking of James Street, the balconies at GETS. Accessible from the Ground floor via a set of stairs that were always horribly busy and uncomfortable at times, more layouts and traders could be accessed. I just went to find some photos and didn’t have any, meh – must take more next time!
Back to James Street, the balcony provided a most unusual viewing angle of the entire layout, and shows the size and achievement of it – 7.25m x 4.2m! Originally started by in a double garage! Read more on their website at https://dwanddrc.wixsite.com/james-street
Layout Update
In last months update I talked about the turn out modifications – well, we’ve ditched that idea. Nice as it way, it’s just time consuming and we just want to get on and build the layout – so back to standard Code80/Code55 turnouts and we’ll make them look better if we can.
The circuit boards that I was waiting for arrived, so now we’ve got the 6 pole double row latch switch boards as well as the modular cross board connectors all ready to go.
As for layout progress, we’ve made some of that! *ALL* the track is laid on Board 1. 2 of the Cobalt Digital iPs are installed with a further 2 to be added.
Board 2 has a lot more trackwork with 13 point motors! It’s gonna be fun!
