Solihull MRC Exhibition 2015

I wandered along to the Solihull MRC local show on Saturday.  There were some lovely layouts and the larger scale ones tended to catch my eye.  I do like the “heft” you get in larger scales.

Here’s a few of my favourite layouts and like all shows, there was something to see and learn.  I did end up buying some water lilies from JTT for my water videos – vegetation is coming up at some point.

Swan Bank had a lovely feel to it – very nostalgic and evocative of the era.  It had some lovely weathering and an industrial feel.  It’s a 7mm O gauge by Paul Challenor and this is their write up:

This layout has been built in less than a year and made its debut at the Warley Show 2012. My history is as an accomplished military and aircraft modeller and I have carried many skills from this over to the model railway scene. I started in N gauge but soon made the change to O gauge after seeing my dear friend, Kevin Cartwright’s, Stodmarsh layout. I discovered that this would be a better gauge to work in, and I also developed the skill of building etched brass locomotives.

What you see today is a small O gauge layout, built primarily to go on to the Exhibition circuit.  It can be set up at home and is easily transported in the family car.

The layout is fictitious, depicting a small road, rail and canal interchange somewhere in the West Midlands, in the BR period. It utilises some of my recently built stock. The locos and rolling stock are mainly brass and plastic kits, many of which are from the Connoisseur Models range. The Proprietor of Connoisseur has helped me greatly with advice on kit assembly and choice of motors etc. The buildings are a mix of kits, Skytrex and modified and scratch built.

Continuing the industrial theme was Primrose Hill by Mike Bragg.  It’s another 7mm O gauge layout:

Primrose Hill was once part of Earl of Dudley’s Saltwells branch. The layout demonstrates that you don’t need acres of space to model in O gauge as it is only about the size of a large ironing board. The main focus of the layout is the buildings which are Noah Hingleys who made the anchors for the Titanic, Lloyds Proofing House which tested chains, The Round of Beef pub and the Transhipment shed. The buildings are all scratch-built using 2mm Lite Ply embossed Plastic overlays. The track is code 100 rail (commonly used in OO gauge) soldered on to copper-clad sleepers.

This was probably my favourite layout – Millend in 16.5 gauge by David Jeanes:

Millend is a freelance layout depicting a narrow gauge railway somewhere in Wales in the 1930’s. It is a small exhibition layout that hopefully creates the character of a narrow gauge railway. Locomotives and rolling stock have all been scrath built by me out of plastic and wood, but they don’t follow no particular prototype. Control is DCC and points are hand operated. 

I’m a sucker for wharfs!  This is Little Kidmore Wharf which sadly didn’t have a write up but was still great fun to see and captured that gritty canal/rail feel:

There was loads more to see but that was it from Solihull MRC’s exhibition – until next year.