LocoLadies CF

Thanks for subscribing. I was only saying to my husband today that your videos and monochrome concept for a layout are a breath of fresh air. Model Railways are very popular in Japan. Like you, I come from a craft and artistic background and I am so glad my grandkids got me into railway modelling. Mind you, in the 5 years I have been doing this they have completely grown up but still love to come and see what I have been doing. Who would have thought I would end up on tv four times and have upwards of 20 articles in British Railway Modelling and Railway Modeller. Not me certainly!!! Do you go to exhibitions. I will be at the Warley National Exhibition at the NEC with my Winter Magnorail Village with two of my fellow LocoLadies* on stand D41. Come and see us if you do go. We have cake!! * I was team leader of the LocoLadies who took part in the Great Model Railway Challenge on Channel 5. We withdrew after the first heat due to illness in a team member BUT ended up with tons of publicity and invitations especially to Warley where we joined the winners.

Hi. My name is Carol Flavin. I have been active in the model railway scene for a few years. I have an article on my Winter Magnorail Village in the latest issue of British Railway Modelling and will be taking it to The National Model of Railway Exhibition at the NEC in November. I have previously modelled in OO and also have an oo9 Narrow Gauge called The Harland Light Railway. I started railway modelling for my granchildren but have ended up modelling for myself because I love doing it. They were the ones that encouraged me to set up a YouTube channel which I call Model Railway Scenics with Carol Flavin. Are you new to this or have you been railway modelling for a while?

Well deserved Jamie. So pleased I voted for you as the contest was such a close one!!

Thanks for all the hard work that has gone into this. I enjoyed dipping in and out of it over the two days and definitely appreciated Phil’s layout creation videos. Picked up some good ideas from it just at the right time too. Some amazing layouts to look at as well. Well done all.

The Locoladies were the first (and at the moment only) female team to take part on last years The Great Model Railway Challenge on Uk Channel 5. It is still available on catch up and we were in Heat 3. We were a team of 5 rather than 6 as it was hard for me as team captain to find females who were interested in joining me - mostly I think because they were afraid of publicly making fools of themselves. In the end more of my team were crafters than railway modellers. We definitely didn’t make fools of ourselves and were invited to go to the Warley Exhibition last November to show off our layout. We were in the National and local press as well as two of the most significant model railway magazines (British Railway Modeller and Railway Modeller). Unfortunately due to the ill health of one of our team we withdrew at the end of our heat but were invited back to be in the background at the final. By the way ... we had an absolute ball. We became well known for having a forest of crochet trees which we sold off for Breast Cancer Awareness at Warley and made £350 for the charity. We had to dismantle the layout after Warley as we are not members of a club and had no where to store it, but have had many invitations to undertake demonstrations at exhibitions. We were or are due to go to Warley again this November (??). I thought you might like to see a few pictures. Two from the tv programme and two from Warley.

We gave Kathy a pink glitter tree mounted like a trophy. To be fair, I genuinely think she was pleased with it.

Thank you for this. We had a great time at Warley and I am still stunned at the enthusiasm for buying the crochet trees. We got over £300 for them and in total were able to give £480 to breast cancer charities. This included Corina and my fees for writing articles, and a percentage of her superb railway art cards sales. Sorry to have to dismantle Bucolic Britain but we had a lot of fun with it. What a year!!

This is a real insight into just how hard the finals were - and in all fairness you have made us really glad that we withdrew because we would not have been able to achieve what we intended doing with all the interruptions and the truncated time you had. So very well done. Your other layouts give a good indication as to what you could have achieved. I really liked your Victorian lattice arches. Were they scratch built or did you find a kit for it. If so I never found anything as attractive and I have somewhere I would use something similar on my own layout. So pleased you decided to complete it how it should have been. Hopefully we will be able to see it at an exhibition one day soon.

That’s a shame. I misread Graham’s post and thought it was the whole board. I have no doubt what he takes for the demonstration will attract a lot of interest though.

They will be very welcome. Out of interest, we are being sponsored by PECO with a prize draw of a Peco Setrack Starter pack. We wanted to do a little quiz based on our layout for children. We have some stickers and little sweets (so long as they have parental permission for them!) and Peco are helping out with the costs of doing this and a prize as well. We are grateful to them as the printing costs would have been rather high for us. Warley is so popular that we realised we would have to print around 500 sheets!!! We hope all our younger visitors will enjoy it.

What a brilliant advertisement for the GMRC. Altogether there will be six very different layouts on show at Warley. Three from the winners of course, plus ours and now the great layout from WCR. I also understand Team Granthams semi layout will be there ... so it will be lovely to see the layouts again and have a chance to catch up with all the team members ..... and any one else who wants to come and visit us too.

What sticks in my mind is how much interest has been shown in our crochet trees. They were meant to be something different, a bit of fun, to add some colour and shape and were definitely a bit tongue in cheek. I think Kathy’s antipathy probably helped as it engendered a fair amount of sympathy for us. As someone on this forum said - you don’t go outside and see plastic trees either!! Half expected to be ridiculed, so really pleased people have taken them in the spirit we intended.

We were at the final and were so impressed by all the hard work and beautiful modelling that took place. It was fun to be in the audience - probably less so for those taking part. It will be great to catch up with you and whilst we are planning to have cake at Warley (which you are welcome to join us for) we aren’t sure how long it will last!!! This was Jill’s cake for our heat.

I don’t think they asked for volunteers to join next year’s GMRC or did I miss it? Hope this doesn’t mean there won’t be another series.

A well deserved win. But it was very tense and exciting waiting for the results. So pleased we were asked to go back to Fawley Hill and watch the final presentations.

We were invited to attend the final of the GMRC as guests. We were in awe of the hard work and talent that went in to completing all three layout boards by each of the teams. Never mind the fact that we know what the outcome was ..... we are still really excited to see this final and to see how the huge amount of film has been edited together to make the finished programme. Lovely to have time to look round Fawley Hill at leisure too.

We will be exhibiting our Bucolic Britain layout as guests at Warley NMRE. After that the board will be split - we got the baseboard that was 4x4x2. I am having the 2ft section either to incorporate in my layout at home or turn it into an exhibition layout. Never having exhibited before, I will decide after Warley as to whether I would want to carry on exhibiting!! Chrissy is having the rest of the board. She will make a revised layout and scenics on it with her grandchildren. We are a loose affiliation of friends and family leading busy lives, so LocoLadies will come back together again if invited ..... for instance a chance to go to the third series GMRC as visitors (if it happens) would be great fun!!! There are going to be a number of articles about us in various model railway magazines, and any fees negotiated have been passed on to Breast Cancer Awareness.

So a year ago my grandson said “go on grandma, you could do that” after we had watched The Great Model Railway Challenge. What a difference a year makes. Putting together an all female team was interesting. Making a layout in 24 hours in front of cameras was definitely a challenge, especially watching the heat on the tv with my family. Being asked to go to the Warley NMRE was a real pleasure. Even the article about the LocoLadies in a national newspaper, local newspapers, the Peco / Railway Modeller special and two upcoming articles in Railway Modeller and BRM was just fun. The really scary bit is a photographer from Railway Modeller coming today to take photographs of my own layout. Here. Thank goodness some of my grandchildren are joining me - after all I made it for them in the first place!

I wholeheartedly agree that taking part was great fun and that the tv crew were brilliant....... even if I did threaten the camera crew and director. If you listen carefully you can hear them all laughing. Pat Doyle has always been very responsive and supportive, and we too found Ben Cook very professional. At the end of our Heat we found him sweeping the workroom up because another heat was starting the next day and he wanted it to look tidy. He said “the runners should be doing it but they have had a busy day so I am doing it”. Lovely man.

There was no reason to make anything of our withdrawal as it was a decision that the whole team made. The lady with the crutches, Chrissy, in particular had problems afterwards and she was such an important member of our team, we decided we couldn’t have carried on without her. It wasn’t ever mentioned on the show but that is fair enough. Anyway, the fact that we have been invited to show our layout as special guests to the Warley NMRE next month is just so amazing that we are more than content. Especially as the rebuild we have done ready for it has sorted out some untidy bits we couldn’t quite finish!!

Really enjoyed watching last nights semi final - especially as it would have been the one we would have taken part in had we gone though. Withdrawing after our heat for medical reasons doesn’t hide the fact that we would have been up against some absolutely fierce competition. The layouts were exciting and the presentations were fabulous. Well done to all of the teams. Can’t wait to see the final next week. Bad luck Muddle and Go Nowhere, it was a close run thing. I loved the drunken bus driver!!!

Chrissy used a similar system for the lifeboat on our layout. Sadly because the water was still slightly sticky it didn’t show to its best advantage and they didn’t use the footage of her showing it in the final edit. You will be able to see it working properly if you visit us at Warley NMRE. She created it from scratch by the way.

Done. Good luck. Amazing news.

To be fair - the crochet trees had a purpose. The rules stated that there were supposed to be additional points available for trees that were hand made but I think Kathy deducted rather than added points for them. The ‘points’ were the reason I persisted in making them .... long past the stage where I was bored by the process. I was so pleased Tim talked to me about my dads boat. He died many many years ago, but would have loved this show. He had a wicked sense of humour. Say hello to Neil from us when you see him. The Cambrian Coasters were good ‘neighbours’ to have in the contest!! In fact you are right, the atmosphere between all the teams in our heat was excellent.

I’ve been reading a lot of these comments with great interest. I fail to see how anybody taking part in this competition, given the fact that there are themes to comply with and animations to incorporate, could possibly do anything but make a ‘fantasy’ layout based on their imagination. The board is 10ft x 5ft and nobody to my knowledge has filled the whole baseboard with something representing a ‘real’ place apart, possibly from the one set in Holland with real water flooding it (Three Millers) and Team Grantham Heat layout ...... sorry if I missed any of the others. As our theme was Best of British we chose to base our layout in typical British countryside. We were very pleased with our cliffs, our village, our seaside, our farmland, our river and estuary (which by the way, now looks amazing now that it has properly dried). However, despite the fact we tried to make a ‘typical’ countryside, it still had to come from our IMAGINATION. The only thing that was fantasy I suppose, was the crochet trees, and I can honestly say that these have been much better received than I ever expected. In fact I have been asked to make a YouTube video of how to make them. We entered because I wanted to make my grandchildren proud of what I could do and my best friends and family were brave enough to join me in an all female team despite most of them having almost no railway modelling experience. We have had a great time and are very happy with what we have achieved. BUT it is television and a challenge and definitely not the ‘real world’. We have just enjoyed it for what it is!