Some enjoy the hobby by building and hand knitting their own stock or buildings. At the other extreme, some enjoy a "roundy roundy" train set on a board with some sidings and scenery. Those who enjoy exhibiting will adopt a more "theatrical" style with well made scenery, and a non-scenic back stage so that it looks like you are trainspotting and instead of the train going on to Glasgow or wherever, it's just run round the corner onto a plywood plank. Having done some exhibitions and being involved in the "Dolgellau" retired exhibition layout I tend towards the theatrical.
The growth of social media and YouChoob has created another branch of the hobby: the videographer. It's a bit like an exhibition, but without the hassle of getting up early and spending hours building up the layout for the show followed by a couple of hours to dismantle it. Some of you may have seen a series of videos called "Pendeford Yard Today" filmed on Simon Barnes' former layout, which we - as I was involved in their editing and "presentation" - turned into a fictional television station "Bescot Television" mainly to scratch my itch as a fan of old TV presentation and logos and have a bit of fun. Some model enthusiasts take model railways to religious levels of devotion. Neither Simon nor I share that view and we set out to have a laugh. The day some techie called Simon took his rabbit with him to work, which promptly started chewing through the cables causing the morning God Slot with Cannon Ball to go badly wrong caused some puzzlement (actually based on a real life event...) and although Simon has now retired Pendeford Sidings and is building a new project, the closure of "Bescot Television" has left an opportunity for "Wednesford Television" to fill the void for risque ads selling cheap sherry called Cock Marling, named after an actual village in Sussex, or their cider made in the Cock Inn, and their delicious cider infused apple tarts called the Cock Inn Cider Tart.
My sense of humour is never going to be called subtle.
Anyway, I always intended to do the odd film of the layout for the Choob which is why I spent some time on creating the scenery. However, having now had one successful and two less successful days filming, I think I might be enjoying the videography as much as the layout. There's something therapeutic about getting a train to run around the circuit three or four times whilst I move the camera around doing arty shots. It's like trainspotting, but with a video camera. Unfortunately the past two days filming have been thwarted by technical problems. My camera is a cheap job and has a pish microphone, so I bought an external job which is brilliant. Except when I forget to switch it on, as happened two days ago. I ended up with 60 minutes of silent movie, and seeing as I have spent a fortune on equipping a lot of my stock with sound, I do rather want to showcase the sound effects. So yesterday, I remembered to switch on the microphone.
But didn't notice the battery had died.
So another 40 minutes of silent movie. Eventually I got the footage you see above, although I forgot to switch off noise reduction which meant the recordings were quiet. Fortunately post production by "Teledu Mawddach" was able to save the day.
One thing that has crossed my mind is the fiddle yard, which I rebuilt over the winter, was set up to allow me to run trains to a timetable sequence. However, as I now seem to enjoy the layout as a film set rather than a train set, I'm beginning to think I might need to simplify the fiddle yard, to make it more reliable, allow longer trains and allow me to swap stock more easily. It's sort of working for now but I think I might bite the bullet and just redo the fiddle yard (easily done as it doesn't have the track fully ballasted) with no more than three sidings which will allow them to be longer, have fewer reverse curves and pointwork and permit trains to run round in the circle several times whilst being filmed from different angles.
I'm beginning to think the layout is the equivalent of the Forth Bridge or Birmingham City Centre and will never be finished.
Wednesford Trainspot May 1988
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