This week I have been exhibiting my layout Charlton at the East Grinstead model railway exhibition. Give the country is in a state of hysteria about Coronvirus, visitor numbers were healthy. There was a really good range of layouts at the show and I met and chatted with a lot of people. Charlton performed faultlessly again and I am feeling pretty confident about how I put the layout together. It is its fifth show with virtually no maintenance and it continues to operate really well, although I need to fix a couple of minor things. However, Charlton is a fiddle yard to terminus. This is great fun to operate at home for an hour or two, but in an exhibition hall it is a very tiring layout to operate. Footfall in the exhibition tailed off in the later afternoons, so I had some time to shoot a few little videos. One of the things I liked about operating the layout this weekend was I have finished the third passenger coach. This means the run around loop doesn't work, as the train is too long. So I now have another locomotive stabled in a siding to run onto the end of the train and pull it away. Not really prototypical, but much more fun to operate.
I am now keen to be able to finish off a few of the other modelling projects and start planning a much bigger layout. Fingers crossed that a house move later this year will be the last in a long line and I can start building something that I can keep permanently operational. Until then, I have no further exhibitions to attend. I plan to build a small layout (3ft x 1.5ft) just to keep me going and use this micro-layout as part of a bigger plan.....
Class 25 on a short parcels train.
A western bringing in the 3 coach passenger train.
A class 22 running around a branch freight.
Thanks to all at East Grinstead MRC who made this weekend so much fun!
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