The Great British Model Railway Show 2026

Welcome to my stand at the GBMRS. As usual, it's a selection of projects that I've built for magazines and on this blog. It's not a BRM event, so the tables are full of the contents of my head!

Since losing my Dad, it's a show I have to do on my own. Fortunately, the stewarding is carried out by members of the L&WMRS, so there's no problem with a short comfort breaks, tea delivery, or the chance to collect my lunch. As an added bonus, on Saturday, my boss Debbie, and colleague Steven turned up to do a bit of layout scouting. Both were roped in to pretend they were me for a few minutes. 

None of this is a problem. I spent pretty much the entire weekend chatting to people - which is my favourite part of the hobby, and certainly makes the day pass quickly. As well as a couple of battery-powered working layouts, I had my G1 loco available on a rolling road. Kids were invited to drive it, and also switch the "smoke" on and off. They loved doing this, and I encouraged parents to come around the back to capture the moment on their phones. 

All this meant even less wandering time than normal. A shame, since the quality of layouts was very high. You can expect to see a few on the pages of BRM (I carried out a shoot on the Friday evening, and there will be others) as well as at Warners shows. 

Trade was fine, and as I'll show tomorrow, liberated a little cash from me. 

Numbers looked good, and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. We saw more families than normal, possibly because the show takes place in the motor museum, so people can enjoy both cars and trains. 

Everyone was pretty well behaved to. I always stick "Do not touch" signs on the display, and only had to ask a couple of adults to comply. One got in a huff, especially when I refused to sell him my latest magazine project. The other said "Oh, I'm always doing that" as though this is an excuse. I'm happy to talk anyone through anything on the stand, and if we do that, I'll normally hand it over for a good look, highlighting any potential breakable parts. Is it so unreasonable to ask people to look with their eyes, and not with their fingers? And why is is older adults who struggle with this?  

I even managed some CatBus chat, of course it was on the stand, with the owner of the layout that inspired me to head to London and then buy a kit, plus a family whose child was called Howl, after the studio Ghibli film Howl's Moving Castle!

All in all, a very good weekend, where I managed very little modelling, as it should be. There is a French toilet block (more of that next week) and the brake van that goes along each year gained some partitions and sandboxes. If you dropped by for a chat, thanks very much, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And I hope you enjoy this blog too. 

There are some photos from the show on my Flickr album.  

  

Saturday Film Club: 1990: Building Dioramas and Models

Let's head back to the good old days, when TV used miniatures to help explain things. Miniatures built, and presented by Matt Irvine. 

The CatBus has arrived!

 

What colour is a CatBus? 

On stage, it's bright orange, but in the films, there is a bit more subtlety, so I've plumped for more AK Off-white (must get another one of those) and the same company's Brown. Even though the parts were primed in white, it took at least three coats to build a depth of colour I was happy with. Blasting things with a hair dryer is very effective. The paint seems to take quite a while, admittedly in cold conditions, to harden so one coat doesn't lift the previous one otherwise. 

Painting the brown is tricky as those pens really don't offer as sharp a point as I'd like. Again, at least three coats were required. 

Not all the paints are the same. Both the red nose and purple flying mice wings cover in one go. I used two flavours of purple in quick succession to blend the colours as I could see from a film still.  

The finishing touch was the route - 1 South Farm, my local bus service. Well, I'd like to travel by CatBus, although I'm not sure that it would be great at following the correct route if my cat is any guide!

All done, and I'm very happy. This was a fun project that I wanted to put some time into for several evenings. It's not serious, but that's what keeps me interested. 

 

Paint pen effects

I'll admit, I don't really know what I'm doing with paint pens. Obviously there are many hours of YouTube out there, but I don't have time to dig through it all, so I've read a couple of articles (sooooo much quicker than video) and dived in. 

First, we have the garden around the house. 

One challenge is to match the colours to the stills from the film of My Neighbour Totoro, which seem to change quite a bit. Then to remember that I've only seen the stage show (still looking for a DVD), and so I want a nice-looking model. It's not about authenticity. 

AK's Off White seems a reasonable base colour for the tree trunk and ground. Arguably, they should both be brown, but we are in a fantasy land. The plants are picked out in cheap pen Dark Olive, which looks really nice, but cried out for some highlights. With paint, I'd dry-brush, but that's not an option with the pens (I wonder if I could drag colour from the pen onto a brush? One to try), so I simply picked up high areas on the ground cover using the pointed end, and streaked the leaves of the tree. 

Working on a plastic base that has been primed with white, this seems to allow the colours to merge very slightly, and the effect is quite attractive, not unlike the hyperreal painting military modellers are so fond of. 

You'll notice some pen testing in the area that will be hidden under the house. These paints change colour as they dry, and I wasn't sure what they would look like in real life. 

Moving on to the house itself, the pure white walls look a bit stark, so I base-coated with AK off-white, left it to dry, then top-coated with cheap pen white. The paint is slightly translucent, so we get a nice aged effect. 

Green windows are painted first, and then many coats of white tidy up the frames. Working with a brush would be easier here and the pen points aren't nearly as sharp as I'd like. 

The roof is red, but pure cheap pen red is a bit bright. I left it to dry while pondering, then coated the tiles with AK Dunkelgelb, and wiped it down the roof immediately with my finger. Result - a nicely aged effect. Even where the paint has worn away from the edges in a couple of places looks good. Not that anyone will be looking at the roof much anyway. 
 

Cheap paint pens

I'm thinking that the CatBus would be a good project to paint entirely with acrylic paint pens. Recently, I've found them really useful - no messing around mixing paint and then cleaning up the brush. Perfect for the time-poor modeller who can see a deadline approaching. The speed the paint dries is another help here. 

To date, my tools have been from Ammo and MiG, proper modellers products, but at my club, the chaps working on the modular layout pointed me at this pack on Amazon.  They are getting on well with them, and for the price, an experiment wasn't going to hurt. 

A benefit is that this provides a lot of different colours, which may be helpful for figure painting where I need a tiny bit of colour, but am too stingy to splash out £4+ on a tinlet of Humbrol. I might love purple, but I doubt it would have gone off by the second time I opened the pot. 

The pens are normal pen size, and have a brush end, and a "pointed" one. Oddly, the brush is the more pointed of the two. Another moan (this is the internet) is that the pen doesn't say what colour it is, you are left to compare it to the back of the box and guess.