Hi all, I am Martin and I was a member of the Railway Sleepers team. We knew that we were the outsiders from the start, only 3 of our team being familiar with model railways. But all 6 of us are also avid wargamers so this is where the model building skills come from. We are used to building gaming tables full of scenery. Nevertheless we missed out by just 1 point and fair play to the Muddle team who by winning the scratch build challenge (=2 points) overtook us. A couple to things. First taking part is fantastic fun. It is lovely to build your layout at home or at the club but it is totally different doing that in a competition. You just cannot compare one with the other. It is a TV format, it is not a guide to building your own layout at home. You need to get on with it and you have to live with the choices you made beforehand, often very restricted, without the info needed etc. We all try to have an ace up our sleeve. Team Grantham had the radio telecope (absolutely superb modelling), we had the laser cutter machine for the track laying, buildings and the illuminated space race boards. On the subject of the Queen Elizabeth loco, ou colour scheme was blue and white. So that is why we choose that loco and James hand painted the coaches in those colours. I still think that our Queen Elizabeth was the most beautiful loco in all the heats. When that thing ran over the viaduct, it was superb to see. And on the subject of shunting, all 3 teams did shunting on their demonstrations. When looking at the program, it seems to me that they only showed 2% of all the stuff they filmed. So much happened.
