We got back fairly late yesterday evening from Epsom so I didn’t get chance to post any photos last night.

We had a good time at the show. There were some excellent layouts on display along with a good selection of traders. The digs and food were good and we also managed to venture into the mean streets of Epsom and track down some pints of St Austell ‘Tribute’ on Saturday evening. I’m sure that our operating on Sunday was much better for it.

Unfortunately the journey down on Friday was not great – pouring rain most of the way and a crawl around the M25 in rush hour – over two hours from the bottom of the M40 junction to Epsom.

It never ceases to amaze me though how things that have been tested back at base can still let us down at a show and result in lots of crawling under baseboards and dilemmas about whether to go and eat or stay and fix problems on a Friday evening. I’m not going to repeat the whole fault list here, but one particularly puzzling issue was the East crossover. We always run a loco around every bit of track as soon as the layout is set up. I did this on Friday evening (including the same crossover set both normal and reversed). Just as I was taking the loco back to the fiddle yard and about to announce that everything was OK I got a short circuit on the East crossover. We decided in favour of eating but it meant that there was extra work to do on Saturday morning before the show opened. The problem was fixed using a razor saw to open out one of the isolation gaps… but this bit of track has been working and pretty much untouched since 2010.

Thanks to Ian Morgan and Dave Stratton for stepping in as guest operators on Saturday. I hope that you both enjoyed yourselves.

Next up is the Kidderminster 2mm gathering in June. Between now and then our plan is to replace the control panel overlay and move some buttons that are in the wrong place. The panel is getting rather untidy now with various amendments stuck on with paper labels or scribbled on in marker pen.

As usual a random assortment of photos...

Lower Exbury - a small layout beautifully executed.

Cornwall was well represented at this show... Diesels in the Duchy.

Law Junction. Definitely not small!

Purgatory Peak

Clutton - very Pendon-esque.

Penlan

The afternoon lull in the St Ruth goods yard - the Carlisle goods waiting for its loco and the pilot waiting to pounce on the GUV when it's time for the sleeping cars to depart.

The buildings near the Hotel with the junction signal off for a main line departure.