LocoLadies CF

9 hours ago, RLBH said:

She's perhaps an example of the target market for the show. She wants to see something interesting happening, rather than a branch-line terminus or TMD that looks pretty much identical to every other one except to the cognoscenti. Whether that's steam, modern image, or sci-fi she doesn't much care, but it needs to be modelled well and work properly for her to take any interest.

 

She also loved the crochet trees in Heat 3 and has offered to make me some for my layout!

Just catching up on all the comments this evening and saw this about the crochet trees. I don’t have a pattern but have been asked if I could do a Video on YouTube...... yet another new challenge in my life! I keep  having a quiet giggle to myself, as I really didn’t expect the crochet trees to attract so much positive attention, especially after what Kathy said about them. 

1 hour ago, stivesnick said:

My concern over some of these layouts, is how they might be seen at exhibitions over the coming year. What is being produced is based around a 2-3 minute presentation to the judges. But how does this translate into an appearance for perhaps 6-7 hours at a show as many of the actions are not easily repeatable (the earthquake scenes come to mind)?

When I designed the LocoLadies Bucolic Britain I didn’t realise it at the time, because it was for a competition after all, that I had really made an exhibition layout that was repeatable and could run continuously.  That may well be why we are going to Warley NMRE as Special Guests. However, our ‘repeatable’ animations didn’t appear to excite the judges.

Our crochet trees have attracted a lot more positive comments than I think Kathy anticipated. I always knew they would be a bit like Marmite though! Love or hate!! 

However, all power to the teams in this semi final though. You all did a terrific job. 

4 minutes ago, noiseboy72 said:

Well, in our modern gender fluid society, I am sure he can identify as female for 3 days!!

We could have done with a 6th team member. I will tell him when I see him on Friday!! 

13 minutes ago, noiseboy72 said:

Put him on the team next time! That forces them to do the paperwork  and it's harder say no.

Ha ha. Trouble is we were LocoLadies and a female team!!!

5 hours ago, Professor Yaffle said:

I hope that explains why you saw our sprogs on Heat 5. It was a proper delight to watch the older ones cowered in embarrassment and the younger ones yelp with glee as they appear on TV on Saturday night.

 

I agree it was lovely to see children there. We weren’t as successful in twisting their arms to allow our younger family members to come. Well done for getting them there. 

5 hours ago, RailwaySleepers-James said:

it's disappointing that KBG weren't a little more consistent with this.  We were told the audience was 18+.  My two daughters are train-mad, and would have loved to have attended.  if fact they've a big part of the reason i applied to be part of the show in the first place.

Ironic really as one  grandson appears with me working on my railway at home in our heat ..... and even HE wasn’t allowed to come. And he was the reason I entered the GMRC in the first place by saying last year “Grandma, YOU could do that” !

1 hour ago, LNER4479 said:

Thanks Andy,

 

As RMWeb members tend to be interested in the background / logistics then I think I'm OK whetting your appetite as follows:

 

For the semi-finals, all teams were presented with identical 'trainset' boards, ie with track already laid. You were allowed to add to or amend the track layout if you wanted to. As has already been highlighted, the idea is that all three of your layouts had to be capable of being joined together in the event of you getting to the final so this middle layout thus had a lead in from the left and a lead out on the right.

 

You had to have prepared and submitted a design for what you were going to attempt, despite naturally focussing on your heat layouts, which was something of a challenge in itself. NO pre-building was allowed but the pre-ordering of the equipment from the series sponsors was essentially the same. The scratchbuilt challenge was still in there - and your design had to incorporate a loading and unloading feature.

 

Not that I'm looking for sympathy at all (I'll only find that in a dictionary), but as the winners of Heat 5 we had the short straw as the filming schedule was such that the shoot for Semi-Final was DIRECTLY the day after the last day of Heat 5 (this appeared to be a consequence of the format change as this would originally have been the second of two quarter finals filmed back-to-back). So we simply stayed overnight in one of Reading's Purple Palaces (all provided for by KBG) and were back at Fawley Hill the very next day, our pre-ordered stuff waiting for us.

 

There was no time to celebrate our Heat 5 win; instead - and as Andrew had dryly predicted (in the event of us winning Heat 5) - it was indeed the 'mother of all pub discussions' over a late night pizza and a pint (or two). I hadn't fully appreciated how much of the design was still in my head!

 

Great banter with the crew and the other two teams on site. I hope you enjoy what happened next ...

 

 

I hadn’t realised that you would be doing the semi finals straight after your heat. We were completely exhausted after we finished our heat and all power to you for setting  to and creating another layout immediately afterwards. Looking forward to seeing it on Saturday. 

8 minutes ago, LNER4479 said:

 

Yes, there was 'no under 18s' rule for the demonstrations, which I thought was a bit disappointing. I assumed this was because of the presenter's risqué double-entendre material...

 

And then three little lads turned up who were transfixed by our rocket launch (they were standing right next to me as I was doing by narration and that was genuinely the look on their faces). 'Great!', I thought, as this is exactly the age group that we're trying to inspire.

 

One of the little lads came up to me and told me how much he'd enjoyed the rocket launch - turned out that he was the son of one of the KBG sound technicians so, presumably, that's 'allowed'?

They were right to be transfixed by the rocket and that is how it should be.  Shame that more children couldn’t go to see that layouts and presentations although it would have been a long day for them. 

5 minutes ago, noiseboy72 said:

As our daughter was part of the team and  required a chaperone, they were licenced for our heat and subsequent appearances to have children present. There was a toilet set aside for them to use and higher levels of supervision. It took some negotiation though!!

That explains it. Shame though as we had a number of disappointed grandkids who weren’t able to come and see it. Pleased to see you got through as the wildcard and really looking forward to seeing your semi final layout. 

This is a general question to everyone who participated in the Great Model Railway Challenge.  Was anyone else told that children could not attend the presentation because Knickerbockerglory is only licensed for over 18s? As some of you will know, I got into railway modelling because of my grandchildren and none of them were allowed to attend on the last day to watch our heat 3 presentation.   My family have just pointed out that episode 5 there were a number of children there watching.  Just wondering if the rules were changed as the series progressed. 

Having now watched four of the five heats (looking forward to the fifth tonight) I am a little sad that the editing of the episodes doesn’t show enough of the excellent modelling skills that are only  glimpsed. A slow panoramic sweep across each finished layout would have been appreciated by all of us viewers I think. Having said that .. it has been really enjoyable. 

3 hours ago, RusselBridge2017 said:

I too have to voice my support of your trees, very alternative, brilliant idea, just what the GMRC Production team must want, but obviously not the judges.

 

Salvador Dali must have received the same reception to start with, for me the most original part of series 2.

Thank you for that .... it made me laugh as well. Nice to do something a bit different. As I said before ... we all liked the crochet trees even though Kathy didn’t like them.   

On 29/09/2019 at 11:52, Edge said:

 

My apologies if this section is in response to my comment - I certainly did not mean for there to be any sort of impression that I was criticising you or your teammates for anything on the production side of the show. You were wonderful and above all seemed to be enjoying yourselves immensely. 

 

I actually thought that the crochet trees were very good fun indeed  I’d have given extra marks for that actually  both for imagination and for an additional skill not often used in railway modelling 

Don’t worry. I didn’t take it as a criticism.... none of the teams can predict how they will be edited.  The directors kept wanting me to say “we are better than the men which is why we were going to win”. Needless  to say I neither thought that nor said it. We just wanted to make an interesting layout that was enjoyable to look at. 

Photo is just to prove not all our water ran off the board.  This pond stayed in place. 

4 hours ago, Phil Parker said:

Can I ask how the lifeboat worked? I rather fancy adding something like that to a future layout.

 

Obviously, with my lifeboat nerd oilskins o, I'll point out the Rother is out of period. Nicely made and painted Langley kit though, and I can forgive anything for orange boats...

We decided we wanted a lifeboat and had difficulty finding one apart from the Langley one. Chrissy had to do a lot of additional work on it to make it as good as it was so if the era was wrong we were still very happy with it.

it is a shame that this bit was seen as a ‘damp  squid’ as we had a chain going round on cogs underneath with magnets attached and with a magnet on the lifeboat. The ‘water’ was dry at the end of the second day but humidity (possibly the additional cameras and lots of extra visitors) left it a bit sticky and it didn’t move initially. It should be working seamlessly when we go to Warley as it has now had months to dry properly!! Come and see us at Warley if you are going and Chrissy will show you how she made it work!! 

We are going to be taking our layout to Warley as special guests, and while we didn’t make the layout for exhibition, we are rebuilding it now ready for showing. This will be once only though as we have been asked to take it to other exhibitions and have decided that it is too unwieldy for us to manage again and we aren't a model railway group, just a group of like minded modellers. We don’t even live near each other.   The board will be divided up between us and the items on it shared. I will eventually auction the crochet trees for Breast Cancer Awareness when we no longer need them.   

However, the track has continued to run faultlessly once we reconnected it and we want new people to the model railway world to know that you can start in a modest way and expand later. My layout at home was made for and with my grandchildren and we all got together yesterday to plan how we are going to expand it and what we are going to do on it. To be fair, there will definitely be wiring !!!! 

We went as serious modellers and created something we were very happy and proud of.  The way we were portrayed on the show came from the editing.  The Cambrian Coasters commented at the time that I was being interviewed far more than the rest of the Team Captains and they obviously chose to use these as clips. It certainly wasn’t done on purpose as it took me away from the layout building  far more than any of us had planned for.  My family loved it though. Grandma on the telly!! 

13 hours ago, MarkSG said:

Going off on a slightly different tangent, I think one of the things we've learned from the winning layouts so far is that settrack is the way to go, and ideally on foam underlay. Now, to us, that does tend to scream "train set". But with the emphasis on functionality, that's the flying start you need. And you can disguise the foam underlay with a sprinkling of loose ballast without needing to rely on the loose ballast to give shape, which, as we've seen on previous episodes, is timeconsuming and risks problems with stray particles causing derailments. To paraphrase the old saying, when it comes to trackwork it's a case of: quick, reliable, realistic - pick any two from three. And the first two are the ones that matter more in this context.

We used settrack and a power rail and the only wiring was to our controller. Once we got the track laid properly and running and the ballast finally dried it ran faultlessly for hours. However.  Kathy really didn’t like it and said we should have wired all the joints. So yes going down that route works buts certainly doesn’t get brownie points from one of the judges. 

3 hours ago, Neil said:

I can't comment on the program as I'm without a telly at the moment but it was pretty obvious on day one that the Railwaymen of Kent were going to be odds on to win. Uncle Nik's buildings were both exquisite and impressive in scale. The Loco Ladies brought fresh ideas to the business of railway modelling and a gorgeous cake. We couldn't have wished for two more pleasant and friendly teams to go up against. Our own layout succumbed to component recovery within a week of returning home. The soup factory has been de-branded and the buildings recycled onto my York themed layout in the garage. The astute might put two and two together and realise this was also the reason why the soup train was headed by a K1.

 

Neil. Thank you for your lovely comments. We too had a great time and have very fond memories of working with all three teams. It was a really good experience. 

16 minutes ago, RedgateModels said:

 We would love to have you and your layout at the Mansfield Show in March, but as it's all for charity we can't run to accommodation. Would be great if we could work something out though

Thank you for the offer but we made the decision that as Warley is the pinnacle of exhibitions and the layout is rather large and cumbersome to transport ... we would only be showing it the once. 

1 hour ago, noiseboy72 said:

Well done all teams, 3 great layouts. I thought Kathy was very harsh on the trees, we all thought they were great!

1 hour ago, RLWP said:

 

Your enthusiasm was wonderful, I must say I was rooting for you tonight

 

Well done on showing this isn't just a male hobby

 

Richard

Thank you ... we were serious contenders and wanted to show what we could do. The trees seem to have been very popular though. More than Kathy thought they would be maybe ...... 

Bit nervous now. Our Heat The Best of British is airing tonight. Photo is of the LocoLadies with the presenters Tim Shaw and James Richardson. They were great fun..... fewer puns this year just funny. Watch the start of our programme though. Still haven’t worked out how they did that. 

I remember meeting you. Were you as tired at the end of it as we were? Great fun though. Really glad we got involved. 

2 hours ago, whart57 said:

Ah, yes, the interrogator ........ 

 

The one on the left is Maddy from the production office, on the right is the assistant director who was in charge of all the head and shoulders interview shots at Fawley Hill.

You might want to look out for something that I said to the “interrogator” if you watch our Heat tomorrow. Her name is Suki - she was lovely really but........ 

And so the route to being on this Fridays Great Model Railway Challenge began. A camera crew came to my house to film my model railway, myself and my LocoLadies team.  

Discovered to my amusement that my picture is on our BT box recording Heat 3 this Friday. My family call this fame at last. Not sure!!! First female team to be on the GMRC. 

13 hours ago, Captain Kernow said:

Very nice looking cake!

 

The latest Radio Times also says that your layout featured some crocheted trees. This has heightened my wife's interest (she's a keen crocheter and liked the series even before this latest news!).

 

11 minutes ago, Captain Kernow said:

Thank you very much for showing us the photo. We both very much enjoyed looking at your trees! My wife says she'd already seen a crochet pattern for a Christmas tree (scale size, I hope!) somewhere.

 

Superb mine rescue scene (if that's what it is), by the way.

 

Thank you. I had to make this pattern up but it seems to have worked. When you watch the show next Friday (27th) the rescue is explained in that.