York 2014

I won't keep you in suspense - my round trip to York show is 300 miles and it was worth every one of them this year.

Visitor no.4700 started his visit with a trip to the restaurant at the top of the hall and enjoyed some tea and chocolate cake. For around the same price as coffee and cake at a chain shop in the town centre, it was just what I needed after 2.5 hours on the road.

After this, it was down a floor to see the exhibits. As my father and I walked in to the room we were hollered at by a gentleman from the Hull model railway club.

Dave Birks (for it was he) has lost around half his body weight and the role of tea boy in the exhibitors refreshment lounge. This means he will no longer rescue people from excessive deserts in pubs and that we weren't going to get a free drink later on.

He was sat behind a rather nice N gauge layout - Martini Junction - which had some fantastic colourful civic gardens.


After this we found the EM gauge Stoke Gabriel which looked like a nice follow-on plan to Edgeworth.

A through station, it has bay platforms and plenty of operating potential. Not a flash layout by any means but the sort of realistic model that you'd be proud to have built.

Finally, there was the MOMING14@YORK collection. Half a floor of micro layouts based on minimum gauge railways. Many were in the larger scales of G and even 1:12 scale but running on OO and O gauge track.

I found the who display inspiring. OK, the operational possibilities weren't much to shout about in many cases, but the modelling and imagination was fantastic. Chris Payne organised this and deserved thanks for pulling a very different display together. I'm certainly inspired to have a go at something similar - when I've finished all the other projects of course!

After this, I know I talked to a lot of people and looked at even more layouts. I spent some money too - mostly on bits of magazine projects but also some interesting pamphlet type books that I'll be bringing to you in the future.

Another trip for drinks (large bottle of orange juice) and cranberry and orange cake (also very good) and we headed to the ground floor. It might seem perverse working from top to bottom of a show but in this case it hopefully allowed us to avoid the worst of the crowds. I understand that numbers were slightly down this year but it didn't seem like it. Presumably the late Easter and good weather kept some of the families away. Pity, they missed out.

The ground floor was rushed around a bit as closing time was approaching. Leighton Buzzard is always worth a look as you don't see models dating from a time when everything had to be made the hard way very often. Leicester South is a huge layout with a real look of the late BR steam period. Novelty provided by the motorised vans to replicate capstan shunting appeals to me too.

Anyway, as usual, loads of chat, some good trade and more inspirational layouts than normal.

Go and have a look at my photos on Flickr.

Edit: Any reference to food has now been crossed through to avoid offending people.