Author

Tom Cunnington

Date

6th September 2025

Reading Time

3 minutes

Minories made its first exhibition outing of the year to the EM Gauge Society event in Wakefield at the end of August – expoEM Summer. These events focus on quality 4mm scale modelling – with EM and Scalefour Layouts on show, alongside demonstrations and a range of the smaller traders who generally manufacture quality 4mm scale products and who don’t always go to the bigger shows. The event  therefore attracts a range of OO scale modellers too, and is a little less busy so there are no barriers and plenty of time to chat.

I’m still getting used to the new (to me) box trailer that we use to transport the heavy and bulky bits of the layout, but loading went well on the Friday before a very tedious slog up the M1. The day before I did a similar trip in 3.5 hours, this took 5.5 but nothing to do with the lower speed limit of a trailer – simply the amount of slow traffic. But on arrival I met Oliver, Hugh and Rob who had all made their way there separately full of energy. We unloaded and assembled the layout pretty quickly – but at Rob’s suggestion I need to think better about how we better place all the items on the floor when unloading within the footprint so we can avoid moving things twice or more as erection progresses. “Mostyn” have a very thorough set-up plan, as some of us saw at Ally pally last year – a plan of what goes where at unload…( as also detailed in their recent Scalefour News articles, available to browse in our library) which may be a bit extreme, but something we should think about for Club layouts more.

We found a fault on one of the fiddle yard points on testing, leading a large dead section, but that was identified and a quick solder job addressed it reattaching a detached wire in the control panel. I have also mislaid a power supply for the LEDs, but Rob rigged up the spare controller set as the right voltage which saw us through.

Saturday saw stocking up, and a pretty smooth day of operation with Rob and Hugh focussing on the front, whilst Oliver and I worked the yard and did some running repairs to stock. I’m gradually marking up rakes of coaches and wagons into formations that are proven, which is paying dividends on reliability. We did even tempt Rob onto the fiddle yard….

The weekend also saw some debutant stock – the latest Accurascale class 31s and some of their suburban coaches, plus a couple more 25s from Heljan and Bachmann. It was pleasing that exhibition viewing distances few people spotted the difference between those £75 coaches and the modified Bachmann ones that probably cost around £20 in total along with the satisfaction of the modelling itself. As I mentioned, there’s lots of chat at these shows, with people looking for ideas and questions about the layout, the brass strip, the fasteners between boards and the stock.

Sunday saw our local member Stephen Foster join us for the day, and later Jon Sills came up as a visitor but stayed to help us breakdown which was much appreciated. Breakdown was pretty smooth and the journey back was rather faster with the layout back in its storage unit by 10, and a small pile of items back in my workshop for attention before our next outing to Fareham Railex on 5/6 October