First of all an apology - no pictures this time!
Yesterday we took St Ruth to the Burton show held in the brewery museum. I spent most of the day on the fiddle yard where it is at least possible to make eye contact with the audience so was able to talk to a few people. We had some favourable comments from the audience although behind the scenes things were not entirely going according to plan.
Burton is a one day show so it was an early start, setup, do the show and pack up all in the sa
For anyone likely to be in the Wolvey (near Coventry) area on Saturday, we will be setting up St Ruth in the parish church as part of the fund raising fete which is open from 2PM to 4:30PM.
I can't offer you any other layouts or any model railway traders but I'd say that there is a good chance of some decent cakes for sale and the other usual summer fete attractions.
There may be some departures from St Ruth's usual sequence of operations, time period and geographic location.
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St Ruth is a layout that is designed to be operated and (we hope) entertaining, so deciding what trains to run and how to run them is an important part of the whole package.
We needed a way to operate the layout for its first outing at the Oxford Expo, so a sequence was drawn up shortly before the show (very shortly actually).
As the layout is 'inspired by' Penzance, we have used Penzance as the inspiration for our operating sequence. St Ruth is, of course, not the same as Penzance for
Some of the other group members now have access to post to the blog but it was decided by popular demand that I should post a progress update. We decided to dedicate our most recent meeting for a photo shoot. Surprisingly I was the only one who showed up with a camera... even though I don't rate my abilities at phtographing 2mm scale models very highly. Anyway, here are the results.
The station area with my favourite Warship waiting to depart. John Russell has been doing a lot of w
A nice weekend down south for the gang at the Southampton show and a good chance to catch up with Jerry and Paula. A good show all around and nice accommodation too. We were also happy to be awarded the Founders Cup for the best layout by the organisers. No major issues with the layout but no show would be complete without a few niggles to put on the fault list and give us something to do when we get back to base. The black surroundings of the drama studio worked pretty well with our night scene
There is a bit of a theme to our lives at the moment... getting the buildings built.
We have accepted an invite to the Nottingham show in March next year so it's now all hands to the pumps to get a reasonable set of buildings into place on the layout. Most of us have little or no prior experience of doing this, but I think that everyone has produced good results.
The photos below were taken at our most recent meeting where we had most of the current crop of buildings in place on the layo
A quick pic of (early!) work in progress on the next building that I owe to St Ruth, along with a rough mock-up.
The plan is to try to follow the 'Pendon cottage' style of construction (well, sort of) - the key point being to cut the external walls from a single piece of card (0.7mm in this case) to avoid any joins. External corners will be formed (I hope) by creating a 'V' cut behind the corner and removing most of the thickness of the card... well, it worked for a PW hut but this is a
This photo was taken at our most recent meeting. The idea was to provide a progress update... the snag is that none of the completed buildings were in place when it was taken, so much of the progress isn't visible. Oh well... maybe the idea was more of an 'action shot' to show work going on painting the rocky beach in the foreground. There is further geological work happening out of sight at the far end plus some work on boundary walls along the road side.
One group member seems to be more a
Seasons Greetings from all at the Midland Area Group of the 2mm Scale Association.
Hope to see some of you at our next outing - Railex in May, if not sooner.