Expo Narrow Gauge (ExpoNG) is billed as 'Europe's Premier Narrow Gauge Modelling Show' and having made my first visit to this long-running event last weekend I can easily believe the claim!
As I'm rather partial to 'micro layouts' the annual 'Dave Brewer Challenge' (named in honour of the late chairman of the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Railway Society, organisers of ExpoNG) was of particular interest to me this year with the theme being 'a small, working layout based this time on a point and three lengths of track' and I began by visiting stand 61 where the entries were on display.
'Priory Waterworks' is a very neat shunting puzzle, with wagons being sorted into order according to a set of shuffled cards. The layout also features a working beam engine, just visible through the large windows on the left hand building.
'Beta Cables' is based on the 3ft 6in gauge system at the British Insulated Callender's Cables (BICC) site at Erith, Kent and is built to a prototypical but unusual (for a 4mm scale layout) 14mm gauge. Empty cable drums are exchanged for full inside the building, the full ones being carried on special cradles as seen below.
'Farrell Sidings' shows superb use of recycling, being built inside a discarded detergent container! Builder Bob Hughes is a serial builder of interesting micro layouts and details of many of them can be found on his blog Playing Trains
Bob also had this with him…
Surely the ultimate in portable layouts!
'La Briqueterie' by fellow SNCF Society member Tim Hills was inspired by Julian Andrews' 'United Brick and Clay Co' layout that featured in the Railway Modeller back in 1999. Coincidentally, that layout was on display a few feet away as part of Howard Martin's 'Avalon Line' trade stand.
The similarities are obvious!
I'd been looking forward to seeing 'Thakeham Tiles' since hearing that the layout was standing in for Don and Val Sibley's 'Arenberg' which had sadly been withdrawn due to illness.
Michael had only very recently (on the Thursday prior to the show!) completed his model of one of the Thakeham Tiles' Hudson Hunslet locos and it was pottering back and forth with a couple of skip wagons. The skips appeared loaded on the right hand side of the layout and were emptied by an ingenious yet incredibly simple mechanism in the building on the left…
More details of Michaels' layouts can be found at Michael's Model Railways
I should point out that there were far more layouts on display than I've mentioned here, these are just the ones that particularly interested me… An excellent variety of traders meant that I ticked off all the items on my shopping list too!
I've already put next year's show (on 28th October) in my diary!
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