BachelorBoy

A question for you: how much do you think interest in modelling China has changed since you've been on the exhibition circuit? Is it expanding?

If you are a freelance model railway journalist working from home, can you claim tax relief on your layout?

Depreciation?

But it could be a great opportunity for internal detailing that may make viewers go "wow" if you can model the rooms with the right furniture, decoration, etc. Perhaps you cover the cross-section of houses in black card, and then impress people with a flamboyant voila! when you remove it for the viewers to see. (But of course to remain true to the prototype then, you'd have to contact all the people who lived in the houses during the period you model, and ask them what the rooms looked.

Domestic sales of model railways in Japan are about a quarter bigger than in 2019. 13 billion yen is approximately £70 million. That works out at around 60p per year per person in Japan.

The national press does not have enough room to report the infinite number of things that continue as normal.

Aren't journalists supposed to share such "scoops" with the public?

Perhaps I should have written "free mo-style" -- a new standard needed just for UK exhibition layouts. This is the chance to think big, and create a whole new standard of free mo that audiences will love.

Please take this as constructive criticism: the intro is far too long. I just want to see model trains, not learn about the origin of Weatherspoons and look at pictures of an empty pub first.

Err. What does that mean?

In addition to the traditional exhibition layouts, perhaps the public might like to see more mega-layouts of 50 feet or more at shows. Several clubs/modellers could build their own free-mo layouts of 10 or 15 feet each and join them all together at exhibitions. The individual layouts could be used separately on usual club nights with fiddle yards/loops stuck on each end.

Take a tip from bunraku puppet theatre in Japan. Dress the layout operators in black.

Has railway modelling ever been anything but figurative? What would a model railway by Tracey Emin look like?

https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/angola-africa-china-us-railroad-f0e23523?st=la3222fjijoea1q&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink The Benguela railway had some fantastic Garratts

This is from the UK Press Gazette in Feb last year, for 2022. Nice to see a few railway titles in the top 26.

Peco's finances are pretty impressive. Sales of £7.8m ... profits after tax of £4.7m Meanwhile, Hornby: sales of £55.1m ... losses of £5.9m

the only model railway-related ABC pages I could find

Given that the biggest sellers of model railways in the UK, Hornby and Bachmann, import pretty much all of their products from China, then if I thought if could find figures for the UK, this would give a pretty good idea of sales in the UK. So this is what I found on the HMRC's UK Trade Info website So here are the figures for the UK for 2022. But ... as you can see, the definition is not exclusively for models of trains. I presume "reduced-size 'scale' model assembly kits" are basically the type of thing made by Airfix and Tamiya, which rather muddies the waters.. Still, I hope you find it interesting. Are there any people with better knowledge of international trade statistics who can provide more info, please? BB

This seems rather promising....

A new-ish model railway shop in Kuala Lumpur https://www.facebook.com/kaetapimodelrailways d sc

A fair point. But I think the loss of sales small consumer models would be enough to push some camera shops over the edge. They'd already lost sales of film, and developing and printing.

Precisely. But it has led to the end of many camera shops.

As I said earlier, everyday photographers are not on the whole buying their cameras from camera shops, they're getting them from phone shops How phones-with-cameras have killed much of the market for digital cameras.... But it is fair to say that a lot of market research companies reckon sales of digital cameras will grow by about one or two per cent a year for the rest of the decade.

I looked at the shop you linked to. I couldn't find any mobile phones. What cameras do you own?