Signalist

How about an American series? I am sure I can rustle up a team of six fellow members from the NMRA British Region...

There were a few teams that were not able to fully exploit the rules due to mainly logistical and personnel problems (getting a tower block on the plane or not having a full set of modellers in the team for example), and very few cases of exceeding the rules (wrong configuration of baseboards, too many rows of terraces!) that were picked up by the judges, so in the main the rules as finalised worked quite well in the end - the rules were just a bit late getting finalised (more probably would have had fiddleyards if their designs had not been finalised before the rule change). Everyone (modellers, viewers, judges, and especially the production team) want to see something that is approaching a finished model that works, so it is a key aspect that some structures can be pre-built to add a nice quality focus to key areas of the layout, and getting a working animation done in the 24 hours is really pushing it so encouraging those to be pre-built is also an excellent idea (as yesterday's heat showed - the animations were delightful). I am not convinced that there is any need to pre-lay some of the track, but if it allows better modelling then I guess it has to be a plus. I am sure that anyone reading this thread (and some of the layout threads) will have a pretty good idea of what is involved if they want to take part, and anyone who has taken part will have a really good idea of what the judges are actually looking for, so series 2 will be absolutely superb!

That one has been done...

I will have to find a way of displaying my Gantt chart which covers about eight sheets of A4 with the project plan of how all the resources of the team members were allocated to achieve the complete result in the time. I can assure you that many if not most of the teams had a good idea of what was achievable and whether their techniques were good. It is unreasonable to expect non-standard items like the animations to be achieved to a good standard in the time (although the man with pneumatic drill on Walford was an off the cuff idea that worked). Creating scratch built structures to a high standard to fit the theme (such as the Walford Towers tower block) are not going to be done in the time either - a few key signature items make all the difference between a nice layout and 'Metcalfeville' (not knocking the superb Metcalfe range here, just saying that a bit of variety makes a bit of difference). Given how long it took most teams to lay the track to a good standard there is probably no reason to pre-lay the track, that does not save a lot of time and will make things look a bit more even handed. Clear rules before you start with a clear (ideally points based) scoring system, and transparent application of the rules with score sheets, is all that is required to remove controversy. Perhaps a third judge with a different speciality (not a celebrity) might help. Keep the pre-builds - they allow the individual modeller to shine in a way that they might not be seen as in anyway competent otherwise.

I can wholeheartedly report that a lot of effort was made to show everything in a positive light, and any suggestions were taken very seriously. The production company took a lot of advice, and as on here most of it was completely contradictory! Might be nice if they took the competitors as the definitive source of good practice methinks and not the armchair brigade. There were a lot of serious modellers taking part, and I will be doing my serious modelling fest this weekend at the NMRA-BR convention in Derby exhibiting a reasonably large (by UK standards) North American layout with full CTC control of the signals which can show about thirty aspects (makes UK signals look a bit tame!) from a remote panel, just like the prototype. I like a challenge, and having something that can be completed in three days (with a bit of planning) is a breath of fresh air compared to the four years or so other, perhaps more serious, projects can take. I certainly look forward to having another go next year if we get the chance when we will be taking on board what we learnt this year. Next year's programme should be a step change in what you will see completed as long as the format does not change too much. Hopefully the audiences' experience will still be stretched with some scenes that are rarely modelled - I would hate for the programme to become too formulaic with all layouts featuring the first world war! Can't wait for the theme so I can work out how to include a bit of Woodhead... .

Gaugemaster supplied a 4-track DC controller should you need one and were a sponsor (but only a limited part of their offering was available) and the track and static grass had to come from Peco for which there was adequate budget, and I don't think there was any shortage of track or track components. Teams were expected to supply their own stock and were not expected to buy it from the Hornby and Bachmann budgets.

Not restricting the teams to a defined 10' x 5' space might allow a bit of variety. Several teams would have preferred to rearrange the baseboards to 3'4" x 15'. I think that there is an appreciation that more modelling needs to be shown hence why all the backstories got abandoned in the final cut. They have to set the scene, and introduce the characters, but there is no need to show endless views of Fawley Hill - just a bit at the beginning is enough. I am sure that peoples' attention span will run easily to ninety minutes and a bit more judge's deliberations showing the points allocated for each item would be a nice thing to give the viewers something to agree or disagree with. If Four in a Bed can run to two and a half hours just showing little more than the judging and deliberation of four B&Bs the public's attention span will take things being a bit more in depth.

Social classifications used by advertisers to see if the audience is worth pitching to - it goes from A (King, Queen etc.) down to E (frequent inmate at Wormwood Scrubs) or something along those lines. The people considered to have a fair bit of dosh are in the A, B, and top half of C classifications, hence ABC1. I am sure that Wikipedia will describe it more accurately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NRS_social_grade While my club is full of pensioners the proceeds from their downsizing and generous pensions mean that they are much better off than most working people and able to afford the hobby.

While for me this was true coming from a poor family that could not afford rail travel - we had to go by car for the most part because it was cheaper - the only time I went on a train was at a preservation centre. I had no idea what travelling on a modern train was like until as a teenager Mum took us to London to visit a museum courtesy of free tickets from Kellogs. I don't think that is the case anymore though, with much higher ridership of trains in urban areas it must be much more commonplace to take the train. For long distance though the poor will be more likely to fly in order to save money now!

No, but judging by the modellers I come across in my club and elsewhere there are not many C2DE. Perhaps that is where it all went wrong. Modelling is beyond the reach of C2DE!

Drilling in to the BARB figures around the first programme gives some interesting insight. While Great British Bake off might be the No1 male viewing on commercial TV, Great Model Railway Challenge does come in at No29 among ABC1 so there might be some money to be made by the manufacturers on the back of this with the inevitable knock on effects of increased club membership etc. I hope that by the second episode all the ABC1 women who were watching Eastenders on BBC instead might have migrated to see what we did with Walford...

Unfortunately the editing of the show has not shown all of the work, planning, research, and prototype detail that has gone in to some of the layouts. A bit of context would make the layouts a lot more interesting when the location and function of each feature can be explained. There was a lot of focus on animations but little mention of the derivation of many of the scenic features or stock choice. Now, at an exhibition someone can engage with the public and find out what the interests of the visitors are and then discuss aspects of a layout that might be of interest and put the points across a lot better. If the programme gets people in to exhibitions it should make the exhibitions viable and create a great opportunity to try and garner further interest. I have always had a particular irritation with exhibitions filled with tiny terminus plank dioramas for want of a better phrase built that size and way "because it fits in the back seat of my fiesta". You really need to have something a bit bigger with a bit of action to engage youngsters with something happening that is a bit interesting and also a bit contemporary, and show those (often simple) techniques like scenic breaks that make the whole thing seem a lot bigger than it is. Manufacturers need to help a bit too with making a bit more contemporary stuff. How many people pop down to their local station and see a Pendolino? Not many. They are more likely to see a 313, 319, 317, or any of the myriad of newer suburban EMUs that the manufacturers have yet to produce. All the while modelling is seen as old things portrayed by old people we are going to struggle to engage. When I was starting out I wanted to model what I saw but I could not, and found it most frustrating - ready to run is the fundamental building block that everyone starts with and what greater things are made from. Exhibitions can be a bit of a nightmare to populate with good layouts and staff, but perhaps now some priority should be given to layouts that are a bit more engaging and have dedicated people to do the 'Captain Peacock' role of greeting the visitors (especially those who do not look like they are present to count rivets) and show them the wonders of our hobby. I know what a Metcalfe kit is, and the prevalence of them shows how good they are, but a newcomer to the hobby can quickly be shown that they can make one of these with no previous skill and have something a bit interesting and in no time will be bashing the Metcalfe, ballasting track and have something they are proud of. We need to be a bit aspirational and let the visitors decide what they can and can't take away from the ideas. There is no reason that the Thomas layout has to be on a flat 6' x 4' baseboard with a token point and station - if you really have to have a Thomas it can be a lot more representative of Sodor and more interesting to operate! There is a lot of prototype reference material out there...

Yes, code 75 concrete sleeper track with full code 60 conductor rail electrification including a substation and feeder cables (which I don't think got shown), versus 009 trains running on 'N' gauge track versus 2-EPBs with no third rail does rather make one think about what we should have done and perhaps we wasted our time a bit on the track. With hindsight I think we should have done the GOBLIN where it runs through Walford and used 156 and 170 DMU (which I already had anyway) with the underground just virtual in a tube underneath. The shorter trains might have enabled a crossover so that trains could be reversed at Walford for operational interest. Bring on the 2019 competition! Need to get in quick while Londoners can still remember what Diesel trains were.

'Allo 'Allo has been done (I think the layout is called Nuvigon) because I have seen it exhibited but it would have to be H0 and we had to do 00! Would have been a lot of fun to do though.

We all met up when doing the Channel four programme 'Biggest Little Railway". Apart from Derek we were all in track laying Team 'D', Derek was in the special builds team. We all got on so well being very resourceful doing a time critical job that we knew we would make a good team. Mark did a stint as leader of Team 'D' so was the natural choice for team leader. We did all end up coming from the nine corners of the universe though - Me in England, Chris in Wales, Maggie in Ireland and the other half of the team liberally spread over Scotland. Heat 2 was a bit of a grudge match with much of Team Sci-Fi also being involved with Biggest Little Railway too!

To look right in the space and be meaningful operationally the crossovers would have had to go on the curves at the left hand side, and that would have meant hand built track to match the radius. Given the brief they would have not been used as crossovers for the programme so we did not bother.

I would like to keep that one under our hat since we have done a lot of work researching it and It will be handy if we get a chance to use it at some point. All I will say is it was a 1980s comedy.

Here is the plan we used. The track was laid out in CAD which is how I knew that we could put a medium radius point in to the transition curve to avoid it looking too 'train set' and the 3D render from the CAD was really good in giving a feel for what the final layout would look like. We also produced a 3D model of the tower block and used Microsoft Project to produce a Gantt chart so that we all knew (especially Mark) what everyone should be doing at any point. Tasks were arranged with dependencies so that we knew which tasks needed to be completed before other tasks could be done, and we arranged for drying times to coincide with overnight.

Chris Robertson built the Café complex of buildings which includes the café in Bridge Street opposite the launderette and the terraced houses on the corner. The café was scratch built and the terraced houses were from Metcalfe kits suitably 'Londonised' with extended party walls and velux windows added to match the buildings on set. There have been three Eastenders sets and the velux windows represent the house as it appeared in the second incarnation before the set was rebuilt for HD. Let no one say that we did not research this very thoroughly!

I built what I called the 'Queen Vic Complex' of the Queen Victoria pub and its surrounding buildings for my pre-build. The pub was modified from the Kingsway 'Queen Victoria' pub kit by removing the top story and adding the very convenient water tower from spare parts. The Eastenders set does not have a proper roof on the queen vic so I used the roof detail from the Kingsway kit as is. The pub was built so as to be able to house the animation equipment which allowed a figure to be placed discreetly in the water tank and remotely ejected using a servo via a slide through the front door. The rest of the building complex was scratch built. The adjacent low rise block of flats is not seen very often so not many pictures are available to work from, but I think I captured the feel of it. The two shops in bridge street are not easily seen by viewers, but the the fronts were made by scaling and printing pictures of the shop fronts and layering the components on. If nothing else the garish colouring should be correct! Queen Victoria pub with the internal animator. Queen Victoria pub with the adjacent small block of flats with some lego ninjas photobombing. Pub with Minute Mart and Launderette in Bridge Street.

We were given the TV programme theme, we came up with two ideas amongst us and proposed them to the team, the team voted, we worked up a detailed proposal (quite a lot of work especially for the instigator) on the agreed programme, and then KBG said we could not do it because no one will remember the programme. They were OK with our second choice of Eastenders based which was more current which we went with but we had lost a lot of time working up and researching the initial idea and unfortunately the stress took one of our team as a casulty. We did protest a lot so I think that later teams might have had an easier time of getting their proposals accepted. In the beginning there was a big lack of appreciation of how much work goes in to the research and planning just to get a workable idea. KBG learned a lot from this and did take a lot on board from the competing teams which irritatingly resulted in the rulebook being reissued on an almost daily basis. I have started a layout thread with some pictures showing some of the detail that was not shown on the programme:- http://www.rmweb.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/138423-walford-towers/?p=3332156

I think that we were lucky with the scratchbuild challenge items that we were given. We managed to use all of the copper pipe - it really is a very versatile item, and I don't think we had much left of the paintbrush. If you need bollards the wall plug department of the DIY store is thoroughly recommended. The Olympic rings, Cenotaph style memorial, and Henry Wood sculpture made a very nice addition to the gardens in Albert Square. We had not planned on having a sewer construction site or a sewer siphon over the canal - but when it was sprung on us Chris came up with a really nice construction site around the allotments which had already been placed. And including the animated road drill was a nice touch too.

Much has been mentioned of our track being a bit tight on clearances for the Class 350 stock that we were running. This picture shows the problem area before we realised there was a problem! The photo was taken before the 3rd rail had been laid on the middle of the three tracks - the right hand one was in tunnel so we did not bother with conductor rail there and I don't think that the judges noticed! Because this area was on an incline we could not pre-lay the track even though it was on one of the boards that we could have done. I think that Derek and his assistants did a superb job of laying the conductor rail and I don't think that many would consider electrified track in a timed challenge.

The Viaduct with Walford East station was built by Derek Souter as his pre-build. The arches were populated with the correct businesses as per Eastenders including Mitchel's car repair garage and the E20 club both with animated signs and welding. Additional animation was provided by emergency vehicles with blue lights which must have been anticipating some kind of bus accident... The station building at street level was made from a downloadable kit of Walford East station which was printed out and mounted on card while the platform building was Scenecraft. The platform was built during the shoot.

What we called the South Terrace was again a pre-build this time built by Maggie McBride. Again air travel was involved so this was built in her hotel after flying over from her native Ireland. The prototype for these buildings is just some fronts on the edge of the studio set, so we used modellers' license and complete houses were used instead. They back on to the retaining wall parapet for Walford South station which does not look quite so tall when viewed from the front viewing side of the layout.