Warley at the NEC

I felt honoured to be invited to the international model railway exhibition at the NEC in Birmingham.

Here we are all set up ready to go with Parkstone Goods. The traffic was horrendous north of Warwick on the M40. Arriving at about 5.00pm we were set up ready to go by 5.45

The Saturday and Sunday proved to be as busy as ever. A good weekend was had by me and my two fellow operators, many thanks guys.

Many rustleings were heard as items were bought from the show and stuffed under the layout. Steve Flint popped over and thanked me for the article in Railway Modeller, more thanks to him and his photography really, he's a nice chap.

A Scammel cab, bulk powder tank and chassis was purchased from Road Transport Images to make a Blue Circle cement lorry (more on this soon) I wish these guys all the best with there new venture in taking over the buisness. I was informed that a new website is being built.

Thank you all for the great coments that were recieved for the layout, it behaved impeccably throughout, apart from me blowing a chip in a class 33/1 trying to run two sugar cub speakers from a V3 chip, a rather expensive lesson learned.

Thanks to all the team at Warley model railway club for putting on another great show.

Rod Stewart and his model railway

The Jeremy Vine show on radio 2 talking to Rod Stewart and Jools Holland. It starts at around 35 minutes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000b4vn

Passenger

Picked these up of your well known auction site. 25 seated passengers for 4 quid including delivery.

Ok, there a bit on the shiny side, a quick blow over with some Matt coat will sort that.

I bought the Thumper it needs passengers.

Planning a layout

Planning a layout and a neat idea. No computers needed.

It's always fun when you come up with a new idea for a layout. You sketch it out on a scrap piece of paper thinking, yeah, looking good.

The next question is of course, well, 3 actually , will it work? Is there play value ? Will it fit in the space available ? All of these questions are of course important and well worth taking time to consider them in a bit more detail.

I came up with a plan recently to build the Cement distribution sidings that was originally going to be built prior to Parkstone Goods becoming the layout it is.

I had a space 9ft x 22inches, drawing this out to scale using 1inch to the foot. Below is the result.

You will notice some strips of paper below the plan with, V-tanks, 33,(that's your class 33 loco), 47, presflo's and anything else that you may want to run written on them. I have cut the trains to scale as they will be in sets.

We can then use these 'Tags as a means of playing trains to see how it might run and trains lengths are ok and will actually fit in the sidings and passing loops that may be present on the layout.

I tend to do these sort of things the old fashioned way rather than spending hours on a computer with one of the software programmes available, well, it works.

Sorry about the poor quality of the picks but I did on the spur of the moment thinking it maybe helpfull to someone. This is just a little idea I had and this time, it wasn't conceived on the M40.