COTSWOLD MODEL RAILWAY SHOW

 20 & 21 OCTOBER 2012

Click on picture above for review of the 2009 show

Click on picture above for review of the 2010 show

Click on picture above for review of the 2011 show

It was also the third show to feature The Exhibitor's Cup, in memory of Bert Hawkins, the Gloucester Club President who sadly passed away late in 2009.  Bert was an active member of the Gloucester Club, joining in the mid 1960s.  His larger than life charisma rubbed off on the entire membership from day one.  He was the fulcrum of the GMRC, holding every committee position over the years.  When the GMRC President, the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, passed way, Bert was made President, a position he valued and held with great honour and distinction.

An excellent modeller, his layout - Kingsgate - was popular on the exhibition circuit and appeared at the 2009 Cotswold Show.

With the full support of Bert's son Nigel, The Exhibition Committee introduced The Exhibitor's Cup, to be voted for solely by the exhibitors, and awarded to the layout that they consider the best in show. 

The first winner of The Exhibitor's Cup was Cheltenham South and Leckhampton and the second was Chris Hopper's Pixash Lane. Both are pictured above.

In 2012 the third winner of The Exhibitor's Cup was also the first foreign image layout and the first in N gauge - A Glimpse of the Algarve by John Cannons - pictured above.

Pat Arnold was a long standing stalwart of Gloucester MRC and the Cotswold Show and the winning layout is voted for by the visiting public to celebrate the very best of design, operation and presentation with particular attention to layouts which display the enthusiasm in modelling that Pat promoted for many years.

"Snowdon Ranger", pictured above, was named after a station on the line, opened high above Lake Cwellyn in 1878 but was itself built by Vulcan Foundry as works number 739 at Newton le Willows in 1875.  The 0-6-4T Single Fairlie was scrapped in 1917 although its major components were used to repair Vulcan Foundry 738 "Moel Tryfan", eventually scrapped by the Festiniog Railway in 1954.

The intention had always been to model virtually everything from scratch and this has largely been accomplished, the choice of the unusual scale of 8mm to the foot leaving little other option. The track was spiked to wooden sleepers in the prototypical fashion and the ballast had been produced from crushed slate. The locomotives were constructed from nickel silver and brass, information having been obtained where possible from the manufacturer's original drawings. Coaches and wagons were constructed from wood, nickel silver or plasticard on nickel silver and brass underframes. Additional stock is planned, a Cleminson six wheeled coal wagon having recently joined the fleet and some more large coal wagons are on the way.

Stonework on the buildings had been produced by building up layers of Polyfilla onto a scribed plaster base, the resulting texture finish being painted with watercolours. The corrugated iron was obtained from Slater's sheet, which works out exactly right for the chosen scale. Grass was made from individual clumps of plumber's hemp while bushes and other scenery was made from a variety of materials. Dinas Ddu was first started in the mid 1980s and is now virtually complete, although there is scope for further scenic development. The layout will eventually be extended to include most of the narrow gauge station at Dinas, although it will not be practicable to include the large sidings complex.  One of my favourite aspects was the illuminated workshop, complete with mechanic sawing away at a bench by a window.

Brockley Acres is set around 1950 with trains from the Big Four - GWR, LMS, LNER and SR - as well as some early BR and pre-Grouping items operating a fictitious secondary line between Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. There can be as many as five electrical sections with analogue controllers requiring three operators to work the entirely manual points linking Peco and Hornby tracks.

In his instance the base boards were 3mm MDF covered with old snooker cloth and supported by paste tables. The 22' x 7' layout took five hours to assemble and test with a Stationmaster controlling the Anticlockwise Main Line and the Terminus while the Yardmaster controlled the Clockwise Main Line and the Outer Goods Loop.

Large Setrack layouts such as Brockley Acres are rare, although the points were somewhat crude and could not take all locomotives.  Many bogies, pony trucks and freight wagons were also weighted to avoid derailment on frogs.

At the buffer stops of Crantock station, above, was 46140 "The King's Royal Rifle Corps", one of the 1927 Fowler-designed Royal Scot class 4-6-0s as rebuilt by Stanier from 1943 with taper boiler, new cylinders and double chimney.  Still in dark blue Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway livery was one of the 2P 4-4-0s built at Derby in 1914 and absorbed into LMS stock in 1930, the same year in which the S&DJR's own Highbridge locomotive works closed.  They were later numbered 40322-40326 by British Railways.

The main stores and office were constructed with the exteriors visible to exhibition visitors and on this occasion Dovington Camp was represented in the lead up to the Gulf War of 1990 with the local Guard's Brigade (made from classic Airfix Guards Colour Party and Guards Band soldiers adapted to carry SA80 rifles) parading to receive new Regimental Colours from the Preiser model of HM The Queen.  You can just imagine what HRH Prince Phillip might have said!

Dovington was previously seen at Cheltenham in October 2006 in its smallest modular form and nowadays could also connect with Paul Taylor's Anelian Road layout.

Rowington for Shrewley was set in 1922 with one or two colourful pre-Grouping exceptions and a lot of the coaching stock was in the GWR 1912 Lake livery.  Virtually all the locomotives and rolling stock - including GWR steam railmotor 79 seen below - were scratch built while the trackwork was made from SMP kits and the extensive signalling by Ratio, Model Signal Engineering, Scale Link, Colin Waite and Springside Components.  Buildings and structures were modified kits or scratch built and all were GWR prototypes while trees were hand made and other scenery supplied by Panhaven and Woodland Scenics. 

A full article on Rowington for Shrewley was featured in the February 2010 edition of British Railway Modelling.

Due to its heavy armour the Type A12 Matilda II was the only British tank to serve throughout World War II, surviving into late 1945 with Australian forces due to the Japanese army's lack of anti-tank guns comparable to the German 75mm PAK 40 and 88mm which the Matilda had encountered in North Africa in 1940-1942.  The first of 2 987 Matilda IIs built - armed with a QF 40mm 2 pounder gun but always lacking a suitable high explosive shell -  were completed by the Vulcan Foundry from 1937, other examples being outshopped from such famous railway organisations as John Fowler of Leeds, Ruston & Hornsby, North British Locomotive in Glasgow and the Horwich works of the LMS as well as Harland & Wolff in Belfast.

Just as British industry pulled together for the war effort, so trains from all of the "Big Four" companies worked over each other's lines for the common good, including in this case one of two ex LBSCR A1X "Terrier" 0-6-0Ts inherited by the Great Western Railway on the closure of the Weston, Clevedon & Portishead Railway in 1940.

The layout - set in the 1920s before the Great Depression and mass car ownership - was built  some years ago with Peco 009 Crazy Track and hand held controllers by John Craig, who also scratch built some of the locomotives and rolling stock while Terry Lee - a member of The Slim Gauge Circle - rebuilt the trestle and added more locomotives and rolling stock. 

The Midland & South Western Junction Railway overcame the financial problems of its formative years and established itself as a viable and reliable service before being absorbed into the Great Western Railway, along with many other independent railway systems.  During its independent years the MSWJR provided a useful link between the southern railway systems and the railway network in the Midlands and the North and also built branches to feed goods and passengers into its main artery.

After Nationalisation Hollow Fosse settled down into the slow rhythm of the countryside with GWR locomotives hauling mixed trains of Southern or Midland passenger and goods stock and vice versa.

3 mm scale is mid-way between OO and N gauges and was once mass-produced by Triang. These days, it is supported by a dedicated band of modellers, the Three Millimetre Society, which hold an annual convention each September.

The L shaped layout measured 5' x 3'.

The location was chosen because it seemed to give the maximum amount of interesting and varied passenger train workings together with justification for a small locomotive depot providing servicing facilities for freight locomotives allocated to Bescot shed, and passenger locomotives laying over from their duties.

A revised version of the Domesday Book shows the hamlet of "Mellinge Forde" where there was not very much to record but during the Industrial Revolution useful clay, coal and iron ore deposits were discovered in the locality and attracted investment first in canals and then railways, both Midland and GWR companies competing for business.  The Great Western line ran past the outskirts of Mallingford but the line depicted was based on the supposed Midland presence.

The town was large enough to warrant regular calls by Inter City cross country trains together with locomotive hauled trains on provincial routes and DMU services between Worcester and Birmingham. The depot provided servicing facilities . Operation was based on the 1982 timetable with mainly blue diesels - such as classes 25, 40 and 50 - as well as light engine movements.

A whole operating sequence would have taken 6 hours to complete and was based on over 460 cards shared between two operators, each card showing both the train movement and the necessary electrical set up among the 17 points and 28 switches.

Buildings on Mallingford Central (such as the closely detailed representation of Bristol Temple Meads) were scratch built or modified from Kestrel and Peco kits, the track was standard PECO N gauge and the rolling stock mainly by Grafar.  Among these assets, some of the carriages had TPM inlays and suitably modified roofs and underframes and were often weathered and renumbered from the vehicles as supplied.

The Pick 'n' Mix layout was populated by eight wagons in addition to the locomotive.  Five wagons are selected at random and the puzzle is to assemble these wagons in a train, in the order selected, on the five wagon siding.  It sounds simple and it can be, but a lot depends on the selection and the existing location of the wagons.

Know to railwaymen as 'Churchwards rough riders', the 'County' class of locomotives looked very much like a shortened version of the "Saint" 4-6-0 class and were designed to work the cross country services on the Shrewsbury to Hereford line, jointly owned by the GWR and London and North Western Railway. The LNWR refused to allow 4-6-0 locomotives on this line and so Churchward designed an engine with enough power in reserve should the need arise for its use on other lines, but as Sir William Stanier noted: "Churchward was not going to be instructed by F.W. Webb, the Locomotive Superintendent of the LNWR, and designed an engine that had plenty of power to run the service but which had a front end too powerful for the wheelbase."  Ironically, although the 'County' class were envisaged in 1901, the first member of the class was not built until 1904 - exactly one year after Webb had retired.

A quarter of a century later Richard Maunsell was also to look back to the 4-4-0 wheel arrangement when faced with a need for small but powerful intermediate locomotives and introduced the Class V "Schools" engines for a number of Southern Railway lines which allowed high axle loading but could only offer small turntables.  Similarly, it is interesting to compare Churchward's "Counties" with the 4-4-0 "Cities of 1903, introduced only one year after he had succeeded William Dean as GWR Chief Mechanical Engineer.  Both 3827 "County of Gloucester" and 3440 "City of Truro" - pictured below - featured top-feed Swindon taper boilers but while the preserved locomotive's heavy double frames looked back towards the days of Dean, Armstrong and Gooch the 4-4-0 Counties would not have looked out of place next to the Castles and Kings built by Churchward's successor Charles Baker Collett.

The first two County batches of 1904 and 1906 were built with the square frame ends whereas the last batch were fitted with the curved framing. Previous versions were then modified to the newer design. As with most other GWR engines, superheating was added from 1909 and top feed from 1911.  Three members of the class were also temporarily coupled to the tender of 111 "The Great Bear", possibly in an attempt to stabilise the engine.

As greater reliance was later given to 4 - 6 - 0 locomotives for express passenger services and 2-6-0 Moguls for other mixed traffic work, withdrawals of the Churchward "Counties" began in February 1930 with 3833 "County of Dorset". The last engine to be withdrawn was 3834 "County of Somerset" in November 1933.

"Use a photograph by all means but use it as a tool.  A photograph will only give you four tonal values but the naked eye can see twelve.  Painting from life stays in your brain.  It's instant recall.  Observation not only trains your "eye" but teaches you to mix colours accurately.  It is without doubt the best way to learn!  Remember too, if you aren't making mistakes you aren't learning anything! David Shepherd once said to me when I was learning to paint, ".. bash it on and see what happens!" It's the the best piece of advice I could have wished for and it's exactly what you do when you PAINT FROM LIFE."