Nottingham Show

Dad has been a member of Nottingham Model Railway Society since moving to the City over forty years ago. Growing up, their March exhibition at the Victoria Baths was a calendar fixture and until leaving home for university, I went with Dad to the club every Tuesday evening. 

Since the Victoria Baths closed, Nottingham MRS have been one of the unluckiest groups around with their venues, no sooner do they find a suitable venue, than it closes down. 

In recent years, the Society has run smaller shows in March in Clifton, then expanded to include an autumn show too. Until Clifton Community Centre shut its doors and they’ve found a very suitable Church Hall in Hucknall. With their autumn show this weekend. 

No longer a member, I still like to head over to support their shows, meet up with Dad and see some familiar faces who were members in my youth, so made the short trip across today. 

The ingredients for a good small show were present, a few layouts in a variety of scales, trade support, bacon cobs, enticing looking cakes and plenty of tea. 

Two of the layouts were 7mm scale, ‘Ullapool’ giving a good impression of a grey cloudy day on the west coast of Scotland in the late 1980’s. 

The second layout to appeal to my 7mm scale interests was Hayden Reed’s New York Central layout ‘Little Calumet’ set amongst Chicago’s docklands. 

Chatting to Hayden, this compact layout was born by him scratchbuilding an excellent looking ship for his grand plan layout in his attic. Once complete, building a case to house grew into having an adjacent board which could become operable for a cameo dock scene complete with grain unloader. 

Hayden has packed a very convincing dock scene into a very small space and I was very much taken with the touches that alluded to Chicago’s association with organised crime. 

Being unfamiliar with American O gauge, I hadn’t realized just how tight the curves that American O gauge uses. Whilst the locos and stock are finely detailed, the use coarse scale wheel standards. Which, along with buckeye couplers and bogies near the ends of vehicles means that the O gauge stock will happily navigate a 13 1/2” radius curve resulting in a continuous run layout in just 6’ by 3’. A great example of “less is more”.