Awngate at Shepton Mallet

Last Friday night featured, as forecast, gales and heavy rain, especially along the South Coast. Not the ideal evening then to load up the car and set off along the South Coast and into sodden Somerset for Narrow Gauge South West. However after a cautious drive with only a couple of minor floods, a fallen tree and a diversion, we made it safely to Shepton Mallet.

Awngate behaved well bar the odd reluctant coupling, so the effort the previous week was worthwhile. However with an hour to go before the end of the show a point motor failed - not one to a siding that could be ignored, but that from the platform to the run-round loop, necessitating some unusual working practices to keep things running! Still there were a lot of kind comments, and it was great to see a number of familiar and new faces. A big thanks to Tim Sanderson for riding shotgun and sharing the operating.

There were a lot of great layouts at the show, though I was particularly touched by the Wipers Fish Hook & Menin Railway by Matt Wildsmith. This is no romantic view of the Western Front, it is full of atmosphere and tragedy, but superbly modelled in S-Scale.

It was nice to see John Wooden's Isle of Stoner layout as featured on his Blog, it is surprisingly small but full of detail, like this corner featuring a plant nursery with hand-worked line!

The Clee Valley Railway by Peter Leadley is a little unusual as it depicts a 15" pleasure line in O9 scale.

There were lots more great layouts but I'll leave you to browse the whole collection of my photos - though I'm sorry I haven't had time to add captions yet!