Wirksworth Model Railway Exhibition

A Fantasy Model with rising balloon, moving buses, octopus, moving canal boat etc

A beautiful diorama

Details on an O Gauge

Roanoke Round House and Turntable

A Working Coal Conveyor

Detail inside a workshop

Coaling and turntable

Sunday 16^th October

We were pleased to see that (Facebook) Sally and Ian had not only seen the Wales v France semi-final, but had also seen The All Black beat the Aussies on the following night. This must be a memorable part of her birthday.

Lawrence rang to say that he was in no fit state to go to Wirksworth and so Irene volunteered to accompany me.

We like going to this little Derbyshire town. It is so countrified, oldie-worldly and peaceful. It is down in the bottom of quite a deep valley.

The exhibition was being held in three main venues. We easily avoided parking in the town’s only pay car park at £5 a day and walked down to the railway station. Here we bought our tickets at a staggering £6 for the two of us, got directions and went up to the ‘Town Hall’ venue. The stewards expressed great pleasure that the lifts were working this year; so up the stairs we went. This was the main event with a number of prize-winning displays. It was a relatively thinly attended event and we were able to speak to number of exhibitors. The ‘Maun Valley’ exhibit caught my eye as this has associations with my childhood in Mans (Maun's) field. I asked him about the reality of the scene and was told that his first model was meant to be a real scene. However, when he displayed it he was immediately greeted by a visitor complaining that a certain tree was not in the right place. He decided that his next exhibit would be more a figment of his imagination. This time when he exhibited it he one of the visitors was absolutely certain that he had crossed the very bridge shown on the model.

Please note that photography at these events is very difficult, as is the photography of any small scale models. In particular at these events I do not feel it proper or even fair on other visitors to use a tripod; and certainly not set up studio lighting. I do not like using high ISO speeds because of noise and am therefore shooting at a relatively slow shutter speed of 1/30^th with a large aperture. You therefore lose depth of field and the ability to freeze movement. Sometimes this latter can be used to good effect.

Tea Rooms

The next venue was the Parish Room which was a little way down from the Town Hall. From here we doubled back to make our way back to the car for our packed lunch and back up the street to our favourite tea shop. Today the shop was much more crowded but we waited patiently as the owner doddered around taking orders. Irene broke the bank. She had a Viennese cake with cream, which made our total bill go up by 50p to £3.50.

Bright Lighting

Z gauge

Continuing to retrace our steps and going further down the street we came to the Memorial Hall. This had the least exhibits, but all three were very interesting. One was a modern layout with powerful station lighting. Another was the Z gauge. This not the smallest gauge that I have seen, but is extremely tiny. The final exhibitor was showing a Trix Twin layout http://www.trix.co.uk/. This system has a third rail in the centre. The reason for this was that the outer wheels were pick up wheels and were connected through a metal axle and so a third pick up was in the centre of the engine. The power supply was 14v AC and so a solenoid was built into the motor and could be activated to switch the engines direction. The makers had come up with other innovations. Well before the advent of fibre optics wherever light was needed it was carried from a bulb through a transparent plastic tube to the output end.

In this venue we also spied some ‘bargain’ bits for stocking fillers. We also studied some less bargain bits; namely materials for constructing model gardens. Irene thinks that she should be able to come up with cheaper alternatives to construct her garden on the layout.

Now was a complete turnaround back to the station. The station is on the private Ecclesbourne Valley Line http://www.e-v-r.com/. It now runs 8 miles to Duffield. It now runs a fairly frequent service between the two ends; the days depending on the time of the year.

It is an interesting place to visit having a large yard for older standard gauge stock and a short section of 2 foot gauge which used to serve the quarry through tunnels under the town.

It was a lovely bright autumn day for the visit. On the way back we called in to see Lawrence and offer sympathy and hope that it is not much longer before he can be fit enough to get back to work.