D9003

I have only just become aware of this thread, but I can confirm that Broad Aston is OO gauge. The current layout incorporates most of what was there in 1974, with Camwell Junction still capturing the atmosphere of a GW country junction station in spite of the addition of an extra siding and a dairy. Yes, some of the country branch line feel has got lost over the years, but there are still areas of the layout where you can shut the mainline out of your sight and just enjoy the rural atmosphere. As a number of you have commented, the layout is all about running trains from somewhere to somewhere and with a purpose. The system of using cards for freight wagons brings a whole challenge to the shunting of goods trains with each wagon having a specific destination. Having grown up with the layout, it really is a fun layout to operate and can easily absorb 7 experienced operators for a full weekend, stopping only for meals. Sadly, there will be no more articles by HW Burchell as he died in August 2020. What will happen to Broad Aston is not certain as none of Howard’s children has an empty 10m x 4m shed. Rest assured that Tre Pol and Pen and the rest of the rolling stock will find good homes, hopefully largely together.

Sorry to disappoint, the Team Grantham semi final layout was dismantled immediately after the show, although some elements of it have been kept for posterity. Graham will have one board of the Team Grantham heat layout at Warley on his demonstration stand.

The change in timings for days 3 and 4 was announced to us at the beginning of Day 3, not before starting work on Day 1. At that stage it was extremely difficult to catch up given the way in which ‘All the fun of the fair’ was being built. That said, we accepted the change and worked our socks off to get the layout presentable. The demonstration as shown on TV was actually kind to us as there were more issues with the demonstration on the final layout than were shown. Crashing the go-karts was purely an operator error owing to lack of rehearsal time, and our demonstration went downhill from there. On behalf of Team Grantham we are delighted to have received a 5 for creativity - I think it was the only one of the series. The 2 for build quality was a fair reflection of what we delivered. The entire fairground layout is currently being reworked into the layout that we wanted to build and it and our heat layout will both be shown at the Hartlepool show in 2020.

Unfortunately, most of the viewing public want to see trains moving, and a minute is a surprisingly long time for to wait. If nothing is moving on a layout many people will simply move on to the next one.

One of the things that you didn’t really see on the Knights of the Round Turntable as shown on TV was that the white knight actually traversed nearly all of the layout including both the inner and outer circuits and the crossovers at both the front and the rear of the layout, before heading off the circuit to the siding where the horse rode off the train. Therefore, even though the trains were meant to be invisible, there was actually a lot of model railway operation in the demonstration. Also, as Graham has already stated, the animation of the turntable and the lady of the lake were both achieved with model railway mechanisms running on OO track, as was the radio telescope in our heat layout. In both layouts we were trying to make the maximum use of model railway technology to achieve the briefs we had been given. To give you an idea of the amount of model railway operation involved, our heat layout used 6 controllers (and could have done with a seventh) and the Knights of the Round Turntable used 4.