Hythe Parkway - Maidenhead Show Report

Entry posted by St. Simon January 14, 2012

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Hi,

Firstly, I'm sorry for such a long delay in writing this report, I have been concentrating to my A-level exams, which took place Thursday and Friday and I haven't really had time to write an entry for last weekend!

Anyway, to the show, luckily due a conbination of having a free lesson last thing on the Friday and being able to get the van home and ready to load earlier meant that Dad and I could get on with loading Hythe up so that we could make the hall opening at 16:00. I still had one to things to pack as I was quite unorganised for this show, mainly because of preparing for said exams, but by 15:30 we had the van packed and ready to go, so far so good. But after agreeing to have a cuppa before heading off, we'd realised the van keys were missing! :scared: Que 45+ minutes of frantic searching of the whole house, garage and van (including almost unloading it twice) and even a phone call to the hire company (who didn't have any spares!), I have to say shamefully in the end, we found them sitting in a tin in plain site in the garage! :rolleyes: By then our plans had been delay somewhat, so we left the house at 16:45, getting to the hall by 17:00.

Set up was fairly quick and fairly uneventfull, apart for a couple of problems; A push button on the control panel had been pushed too hard and had stuck, meaning a point wouldn't fire, but it was simple to fix, a replacement was fitted back at home that evening. The secound was a dodgy track feed on the extenison with has causing some problems, but half an hour before doors opened with a Soldering Iron managed to fix that. Oh and thanks to the people who came over and helped us with it, aren't exhibitors a friendly bunch?

The morning of actual show day was better than the Abingdon show, but not quite as good as the Reading Show, we had a few problems, mainly stock problems and a couple of dodgy points, but by around 11:00, the layout started to settle down and we managed to work around the problems and put on a fairly decent show (we hope)! The only problems we had from there on in were a bit of miscommunications between controllers, a bit of stock malfunction and a few operator errors. We had many good comments about the layout, including one from a gentleman who lived at St. Mary's bay, only a few miles west from Hythe, he was quite pleased that it was the Kent Hythe and not the Southhampton Hythe! It was also good to see a few RMwebbers as well (Hello Mike and the others! :declare: )

In terms of stock, 95% of stock worked without problems, the pieces of rolling stock that didn't work so well were wagons that we had fitted with our uncloupling system (staples soldered to the tail of the Bachmann couplings, orginally devised by Brain Kirby) and hadn't been able to test very well. Of course, the new MPV made it successfully from Aylesbury (see last post) to start it day of leaf clearing around Hythe and made several apprenances in the station area, even one in Marsh Distributions yard!

In terms of clearing out (or the get out as I like to call it and which will be familiar to thearte Tech Crews) we got out very quickly, he got in the van at 17:42, 42 minutes from the end of the show, which I think is the fastest we've ever done it in!

We had a couple of invites for Hythe, one to a Reading Show in September this year and one to Letchworth next year on the same weekend as Warley. These are to go with one that was confirmed on the Thursday:

24th and 25th November 2012 - Shoeburyness Model Railway Clubs 30th Annual show at Southend Tennis and Leisure centre

Anyway, onto some piccies:

The Scene at around 14:00:

A Southern Class 423 '4-VEP', still in NSE Livery, stands at the approach signal to Hythe Parkway waiting for a Platform road with a service from London Victoria, which will soon be replaced by a Class 377 electrostar, which are taking over services quickly:

The 4-VEP has now run into Platform 2 and is now ready to form a return service to Victoria:

A Network Rail Multi Purpose Vehicle (MPV) stands in the Bay Platform having arrived ready to form a number of diagrams around Hythe. In front of it is a set of coaches that have just arrived for the SESR Steam service to Dungness: