Persephone

Well as of today the layout is no more. Newcastle was to be it's last show, but the cancellation rained on our last weekend away with it which was a shame but hey ho. Whilst the layout had fared well, it's owner and operators less so and the process of van hire in particular was wearing, and soon after Ally Pally this year, I decided we'd do Newcastle and cancel the rest. A severe health issue just after Easter cemented that decision. Most has gone to good use, the boards and legs will form part of another club members layout, the stock and buildings will be put up for sale (watch out for the classifieds ) some of the fiddleyard timber has already been chopped into kindling for our log burner and the rest has gone to the dump! To quote the Grateful Dead, "What a long strange trip it's been" but it's been a blast.

A real shame that it was caped at the last minute - I'd just got North Ballachulish prepped for what was to be its last ever show before retiring the layout. The crew were set for one last blast and a few beers on the Toon. I hope the club are not out of pocket as a result, and next years goes ahead as planned.

A show of contrasts for us - after disastrous start after the layout sustained some damage on the journey down, which was put right before the show opened on Saturday morning, it then performed very well through the show . As for the show itself - maybe I'm becoming a bit jaded with the exhibition circuit after all these years but we all remarked how familiar faces we usually see at shows were missing here, so our usual social "banter" (usually a loose form of schoolboy humour/ insults) with those people was lacking, but made up for by some interesting conversations with viewers of the layout. Like it or lump it the scene has changed forever with a lot of specialist traders in particular deciding attending a show is just not worth the hassle, they have survived COVID trading online, why attend when you will be lucky to break even at best? As a measure of this my sole spending was the princely sum of £1.09 on some piano wire to replace the operating arm on a damaged tortoise point motor. Layouts? some you like, some you don't, like Jol Wilkinson I'm a believer in less is more so those were the ones that held my attention in what little time I had to browse round. What made it for us though was the hall staff - car parking, security et al, really obliging, supremely helpful and polite, and the MRC team manning the brew point, life savers the lot of them.

Getting ready for the off on Friday with a bit of wheel cleaning. Looking forward to bringing North Ballachulish to the show, and to our beery excursions in the evening on the Piccadilly Line.

Many thanks for your comments. The backscene was painted for me by Mike Raithby, after an attempt to get a printed photo backscene with 4 photo images from a visit up there stitched together had to be aborted due to distortion which would occur on the 16 foot backscene - or so the printer told me. I like the painted backscene better though, it has real atmosphere. Thanks to the organisers for their hospitality over the weekend, we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves and it was a really good show. It also was very different from when I was last in the hall 6 months earlier setting up the cask cooling system for the Wigan Beer Festival!

" 'Ere that never ran over that bridge" Myself in tweed jacket old pedant mode on my own model of New Hey, running it as a demo layout at Expo EM North, September 2007, still then in balmy Slaithwaite. They were actually doing some filming for Last of the Summer Wine on the street opposite during the show, which seemed appropriate. Captured if memory serves me correct by one Martin Wales.

It makes sense for Mike to do the same, just as RT did with the Austerity That made the ( erhmm, cough) DJM Austerity do-able in EM/P4 as the DJM all axle driven mechs turned out to be a bag of spanners. As I already have a Judith Edge flatpack 16" plus wheels motor and gearbox, it wont be a buy for me, but if I hadn't the kit I'd be getting a Rapido model and badgering Mike for a chassis.

We hire our club room on a weekly by the hour basis, if we don't use it we don't pay. We do not pay any subs and usually raise the club room rent from the show profits. Therefore at the moment we aren't losing or gaining, although in truth we have had bequest of model railway kit which has appeared recently on flea bay, which if we have to cancel next years show as well as this years will see us well through another year when we are eventually allowed to meet. I should add we have no club owned layouts, but virtually every member has their own exhibition layout, so there are no "extra" costs either. It works for us and not having any club layouts in name mean we can rent hourly. Works very well for us, just a shame we haven't met since March.

Geoff Thats probably the MIOG show which you are referring to, it was held in a school in Rawtenstall, a few miles down the Valley from Bacup and an altogether more civilised place. Bacup is a town where men are men and sheep are worried, and everyone is related to each other in some way. An odd place. To my knowledge there's never been a show in Bacup.

An announcement will be made on September 8th end of. If that doesn't meet your personal criteria, then sorry, but that's just the way the cookie crumbles. For their own reasons, the MMRS organising team and committee has chosen to do it this way. In the meantime all of this pontificating is not helping anyone at all.

Its something we are considering with the Rochdale Club layouts. Glaisden for example hasn't been out for a couple of years now (we were due at Warley with it this year) but it takes a good few hours to assemble and stock up, as well as being a head scratching puzzle sometimes when assembling it. Assuming Southampton goes ahead next January it will be a year since I put up North Ballachulish. Consideration is being made of taking a short term let out on some suitable industrial premises certainly to put Glaisden up, and the possibility of having an controlled "open/running day" will seriously be considered.

1984 would have been at Christmas, this one at the old UMIST building on Sackville St. It was always the last clear weekend before Xmas. Not sure of the exact dates that year

Only if it's followed by a tock.

If I recall correctly, at the time the respray business went belly up, and the resultant fallout from it with people out of pocket, there was a thread on RM Web about it.

How do you get to the bottom of a complete work of fiction? In the Walter Mitty world of DJM perhaps but not in the reality of this world.