BEIJIAO - a large Chinese HO exhibition layout set in the 21st century

[Pete the Elaner]

If Trevor has taken them, you will have some awesome photos.

[380John]

Just wanted to say it was lovely to meet you on setup day and see the layout at the weekend. It's a credit to you and your team and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the action! The only one not so impressed was the 1:1 scale spider!

 

John (from making tracks layout)

[Trofimow]

It took us weeks to train that spider...

[TEAMYAKIMA]

I think it's about time I reported on our experience at last weekend's KEYMODELWORLDLIVE.

 

Overall, it was a positive experience, but I regret that I was so busy that I didn't take any photos of BEIJIAO and so I have downloaded this from the KEYMODELWORLD thread on RMWEB.

 

 

 

So, let me start by listing all the new positives.............................

 

1. In the week before the show I had a professional photo shoot and so I spent several days tweaking the scenery and, as a result, IMHO the layout looked really good at thye show - for example as you can see in the photo I went all over the layout with new static grass and it really made a difference. You can also see that I have re-worked the curvy road to look more like a dirt track rather than a tarmaced road as that makes far more sense.

 

2. The new trees (no photo) really enhanced the previously rather barren layout foreground.

 

3. The new lighting rig really made a huge improvement - here is a photo taken at the Warley show last November and you can see how the bright lights at the NEC threw awful shadows onto the layout from our pelmet and pelmet supports and the whole idea behind the new extra lighting was to eliminate those shadows.

 

 

 4. The trains all worked well and we had three new smoking QJ's which were real crowd pleasers.  

 

5. The automatic level crossing which has caused us problems since day one, worked properly 95% of the time. The only issue now is that trains have to run quite slowly on the bi-directional as the electronics which control the crossing gates need a relatively long positive pulse of electricity and if the trains run too fast they don't send a long enough signal to the electronics - other than that it works well now.

 

Were there any problems? Yes, of course, but we worked around them and they have all been sorted now. So next stop - Aylesbury in 3 weeks.

 

 

[TEAMYAKIMA]

One unique feature of Sunday's operating session was a guest loco. It is a 1930's streamlined pacific handmade in brass by Tenshodo. Unfortunately, I never took a proper photo of it, but I have just received this from a visitor - a classic 'going away' shot!

 

 

In this photo it is coupled to it's match 6 car streamlined passenger rake - albeit with the tail observation car missing.

 

This ran around a few times and then we removed the coaches and coupled the loco to a standard type 22 rake of green coaches for the rest of the day. But this photo does also show you the trees and that dirt road more clearly.