This was the view from my workbench over the weekend. I was hard at work manning the DOGA stand at York model railway exhibition.
The idea is that I sit there, occasionally building something, while chatting to visitors and trying to persuade them to join the association. One of the indicators of a successful show is, unusually, a lack of progress on whatever you are building.
First job was to find something to build – a set of Ratio LSWR coaches did this. I’m building them for a friend who needs an ambulance train for his WW2 layout. Since they are viewed from quite a distance away behind a collection of boats and submarines, ultimate detail is not required. No replacing of grab handles with etching or bits of wire for example.
I must have had some success because I managed a single coach in two days or about eleven hours work.
There was lots of chatting and a couple of modellers signed up. Some people love to ask questions and there is a lot of fun to be had working out the answers. One guy was struggling to work out how to bend a cab roof – I helped out with this and he went away very happy. Plenty of others just enjoyed the chance to have one of the “experts” talk to them about their hobby. Lets face it, if you don’t belong to a club a show is probably the only chance to you get to talk to like-minded individuals without fear of getting laughed at.
Opposite there was a group of modellers from the Larger Scale Model Railway group – gauges S upward. Unusually there were two women working and turning out superb work. Needless to say they have to fend off a few comments from people who think modelling is “man’s work”. How one idiot managed to walk away with all his limbs after asking how she managed to do thins and keep up with the housework amazed me.
A photo in the in-house magazine of a recently scratchbuilt locomotive was captioned, “Who would say that women can’t build models ?” – someone who with a recently acquired serious injury that’s who.
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