It's Over for Another Year

The 2013 Brisbane Model Train Show has been run and is now put to bed for another 12 months.  It was held at the Doomben Racecourse for the first time.  Exhibits were spread over three floors under and inside the main grandstand and in the next grandstand as well.  Right now, after packing and unpacking the car and carrying everything down to the shed and placing it back onto the layout, I'm pretty exhausted after concentrating for the last two days.  Our Club was very conveniently located on the ground floor along with a few other exhibits.  The numbers through the door were down on last year as it was a 2 day show compared with a three day show as with all the previous shows.  At times it was very busy around our layouts especially in the mornings.  It certainly thinned out in the afternoons.

Well I managed to do a few quick scouts of the various floors that the exhibition was in over the weekend.  It was really good to catch up with people I see year after year, with past members of our Club, mates, other modellers and just ordinary members of the public.  I purchased a few choice items like some 12mm points, styrene, copper PC board sleepers, and of course some brilliant trees from Brian at Trackside Trees.

I saw quite a lot of very nice models, especially those in the modelling competition.  No layout really took my fancy this year, except for Bellthorpe the layout next to where we were located.  It was running some every nice O scale QR models.  It was pretty deep around that layout at times too.  The number of layouts in attendance was down on previous years. 

ON my stand, doing Structure Building, I ended up making a small brick shed for my layout, a 3m x 3m with a working sliding door.  I also made a model of a Titan shed next to that building.  Both models are replicas of two structures next to Casino Station.

The photo above I took from Casino Platform many years ago of the two structures I made at this year's May show.

 

I was adding code 40 rail as posts to a number of old power pole cross arms that I had laying around.  I also installed insulators on 13 telegraph poles.  There were 12 insulators on each pole.  That's a lot of insulators.  The insulators were made from 1mm rod and were cut about 1.5mm long. I had people walking past and watching with the public up to 3 deep sometimes just shaking their head at what I was doing.  I think most thought I was a looney - picking up these small pieces of styrene, dipping it is glue and placing it on the cross arms of my wooden ptelegraph poles.  Well they wouldn't be far wrong!

This afternoon I got back to working on my Cassino Meatworks structure.  I finally completed the base.  I'm not sure if this was last worked on 2 years ago or if it was last year.  But it has sat languishing on the layout for quite some time.

So my modelling juices are flowing again, so I think I will be full steam ahead on three fronts over the next few weeks.  I will be completing some run around tracks in Acacia Ridge Narrow Gauge Yard, and also doing some narrow gauge and dual gauge work in Clapham Yard.  I will also continue work on the buildings backing onto Cassino Station.  I will have some shots of that area next weekend.

Thanks to all those bloggers and lurkers who visited on the weekend and said hello.  I had quite a few on Saturday.  I also had quite a few current and retired loco drivers drop by and say hi.  There must not have been any trains running at The Ridge as they all seemed to be at my stand during Saturday.