Blimey, what a month... some unpleasant personal stuff, and a LOT of model-making. All of which means I'm somewhat late to the finish in posting about the Llangollen Garden Railway show- an event which has become something of a regular go-to for us.
Held in the Eisteddford pavilion, as usual, it's a big garden railway show over two halls, with a mix of layouts and trade.
A few contenders for 'model I'd like to build/own/replicate' starting with these Corris coaches.
The Gauge-1 Deltic was gorgeous.
And then there's Mavis, my favourite of the Thomas locos. The chaps on this layout are busily making accurate replicas of the cast from the model series, and these machines were very impressive jobs. Amazing what you can do with 3D printing and modern radio-control too.
Mindyou, this live steam GWR 4-4-0 was rather nice.
This caught my eye, though mainly because I saw the real preserved one at the Vale of Rheidol back in the Spring. Apart from being the wrong gauge, it's about half as long as our whole layout.
An impressive, mainly Isle of Man lineup.
Some nice details- there were some nice scenic models at the show, and modules with good buildings and scenes on them.
Tram loco.
Thoughts on the exhibition... it seemed a little bit quieter this year. Still busy, but maybe not as much as previous years. I've read a few modellers posting on blogs that exhibitions have been quieter with the rise in the costs of, well, just about everything. Llangollen is one you really need to drive to, so maybe that had an impact. The mix of layouts was ok, but felt like it was missing an attention-grabber as you walked in (the slightly manic, colourful Playmobil layout not being there this year). Usual nice mix of trade, everything from relatively cheap laser-cut (though not as many as usual?) to super expensive live steam locomotives. Refreshments were interesting this year too, no petrol-burgers from the internal canteen, instead a horsebox coffee shop outside, and a similar mobile stand. Very nice, but struggling with the footfall so long queues in the rain. Actually on that note, the first visit we've done which wasn't a heat wave..
As per usual, we walked into Llangollen for lunch. Which was a touch disappointing (very tasty, but not a lot of it), though the ice cream from the shop in town made up for it.
Llangollen Station.
Overall? It was still a nice day out; we had a meeting with both one of our Editors, and with a supplier we might be doing a bit of a collaborative project with. Had it not been for those though, we might not have gone along (50 quids worth of Liquid Dinosaur to get there and back, on top of the entry tickets). We did buy some decent swag there though, plenty of bits for future projects, but it does make me wonder if we'll go back again for next year, or skip a year.
