Well, we’re back from Hollycombe, and absolutely cream-crackered!  It was a fun weekend that lived up to it’s advertising:

It is with much excitment that we will see the model weekend return to Hollycombe in late summer. The weekend will have something for everyone, whether you are a die hard modeller or just looking for a fun day out. Across the weekend there will be all manner of models including miniature steam engines of various scales, model boats, fairground models, model tanks and there will even be a WW2 French Village battle each afternoon. There will be model railways and our historic steam powered fairground will be operating as usual. This is one of the biggest and busiest events on our calendar so make sure to come along and marvel at all of the wonderful sights.

The weather held, apart from one short shower, and the ESNG layout behaved itself.  Plenty of interest from punters, and so good to see lots of kids taking an interest rather than elderly men in anoraks.  (There were some of those as well.)

We were located in the storeroom and paint shop.  Rather dusty, but not as oily as the Bluebell Railway show!  Saturday was Japanese bullet day, as Paul brought along a selection of his trains.  I ran my Kato Penn Central set for six hours, and it wasn’t even warm at the end of the afternoon.

A 3×2 modular set up made a large layout.

Derek’s Junction and Goonhilly radomes made an interesting diversion.  We forgot two things on the day – I forgot the bridge for the fiddle yard with the track numbers on it to help operate the points.  Derek forgot the scenic inset for the junction – so we covered it with flyers for NGSE 2020.  Amazingly, some people took them (but we didn’t sell any ESNG wagons.)

Two generations of South-East travel…

Sunday and Allan’s silver (or rusty) bullets on the move.

A pink blur….  Allan claims that there is a prototype for this?????

On the Sunday, we had an ‘OO’ loco shed layout opposite us, with some fine commercial models on display, and lots of little cameo scenes around the layout.

On Saturday, these large fairground models were there.

The rest of the shed was full of fairground models, some to a very high standard.

Like this fine merry-go-round.

The real steam-powered prototype was giving rides outside.

Next post, I’ll have a few pictures of the railway and traction engines outside.