Leamington 2017
This weekend we blew the cobwebs off St Ruth after 6 months of exhibition inactivity by taking it to one of the bigger of our local shows run by Leamington & Warwick MRC.
We haven't been completely idle during this period (almost... but not completely). The most noticeable additions being the ability for our 'sun' to gradually set allowing us to run the layout in darknes. Apart from a black cloth to keep out stray light from overhead this has entailed a lot of work putting lights (controlled by an Arduino under each board) into buildings and generally bringing into commission all sorts of lighting bits that had been built in over the years but so far hardly used. The signals had been built with working lamps from day one but this is the first time that we've wired them up other than for occasional photo sessions. One of our more recent members, Andrew Hyatt has also spent a lot of time painstakingly researching and then creating reproductions of the 1950s era street lighting that is evident in photos of Penzance up to the 1970s.
The second major addition has been a shameless theft of Nigel Ashton's display board idea. We now have a board running most of the length of the scenic section containing details about various buildings and other stuff about how the layout works. For this show it was printed onto plain paper but eventually it will be done with something more resistant to sticky finger marks... because it does attract plenty of finger poking.
Oh, and the show was fun and the food was very good.
Some photos...
The Leamington College provided a handy balcony just so that we could take some high angle photos...
My attempt at photographing 'after dark'. In practice this is tricky because I didn't want to get in the punters' way. As you can see, overhead is not the only source of stray light - particularly when you set the layout up in an atrium.
The roadshow crew doing their stuff
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