Weekend Adventure - Model Railroad Convention

Another weekend, and well.. another convention!

Was quite happily surprised to find out that there was a convention to be held in our little home town here of Basingstoke over the weekend. Makes the trip to get there easier and faster! Less "Are we there yet?" from Junior ( and myself at times! ).

First impressions was WOW on some of the pieces up on display here. Junior was amazed at how they moved, and how they could connect without someone helping ( unlike some of the others we saw apparently ) and would take off again. He wondered what "magic" was involved here to make it happen. :) Was a nice moment to hear that!

Some, as my son said, were just lovely. The above being a prime example of all the small ( on a already small scale ) scenes that were included. Just makes you want to dive into it, and build one up yourself!

One of the largest scale train sets here at the show. I really have no clue about the difference scales, but this seems close to what a 28mm scale would be fitting in. Making it more interesting to me and junior ( shown in the top photo ). I think this might be the scale ( or close to it ) that I would prefer to do ( if space, time and money were no object! ) cause I could double it as a gaming table as well :D Or at least pretend that would be possible...

Though I have to say that although there were a lo of interesting set ups to see at the shows, not many were really up for chatting too much. I guess with it being on the second day, most were kind of burnt out, or ready for a bit of a siesta already. That and most were hidden behind their backdrops fiddling with their train settings instead of checking out the people looking at the displays.

And the traders were a real hodge podge of collections. From the trains, to the tracks, to the buildings.. there were a fair few pieces to look at, but nothing that really stood out to me. Aside from the few bits that I did pick up below.

From left to right.. a book on train buildings and how to work with the plastic buildings available. Has some good scratch building ideas within it as well as the history of the train buildings over the years. Some styrene stripes for later on. And the last pieces are some plastic/resin ( not sure which ) stone patterns. Saw them for cheap, and thought they could be useful for small vignette bases. NIce crisp details on them as well which was great!

Below are some more photos of the show.. with regards to some of the other train set ups! Now to get back to planning out what I would like to do when I get to retirement age ;)