Our Stuttgart visit is over for another year.  Every year, N Club International have an enormous N gauge meet in the Stuttgart Messe, generally sharing the hall with other hobbies and things.  There is a good mixture of stand alone layouts and the massive modular setup.  A lot of people criticise this modular approach due to the different character and scenery of the modules, and the total mix-up of trains running over them.  But for me, the variety is a lot of fun, and when you are operating, it’s interesting to see trains from all over Europe (to say nothing of American and Japan) passing by.

This year, four ESNG members made it to the show – Allan, Richard and myself running our modules, and Duncan (mostly) helping the Italians.  He had the tougher job, operating a junction hidden in a mountain that conveniently hid derailments and crashes.

But the week starts a few days before, as I gathered modules, legs, and other bits and pieces in our lounge…..

Then on the Tuesday, Allan collected me from home at the unearthly hour of 3am, for the trip down to Dover and the 5am Eurotunnel.  It was my first time through the tunnel, and that was interesting in itself.  Emerging at Calais, we missed the autoroute turning, and in the end took the Google recommended route through France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.  Apart from a half-hour crawl in the Lille rush hour, it was an excellent run, and went through some lovely scenery.  The autumn colours in one valley we passed through were delightful.

We even missed the worst of the traffic on the A8 into Stuttgart, and arrived in time to unload the van in the hall before retreating to the hotel.  Next morning, we were back in the Messe at 9 to set up.  Richard had put his modules together on the Tuesday, so we were able to get to work.  We set up my four NCI modules, the two club corners and Saggers Sidings.  All went together well, and were electrically and mechanically sound.  In fact we had just the few derailments all week – mostly from the same trains.  Here’s our empire…

The West Sussex group added their layout to the end of our N-mod modules making an impressive U-shaped layout.  Some pictures of our set-up from the balcony…

And of the whole railway area….

Here’s a plan of the railway section of the hall – with the ESNG area marked.

We were able to retire back to the hotel mid-Wednesday afternoon.  And so to four days operating.  I hardly got our of the hall!  I did escape for long enough to track down the new U-bahn station at the airport….

We did get some classy visitors to see the trains….

At the opposite end, there were the board game players – very popular, as you could play a game to see if you liked it before buying it.  Here are some shots of the non-railway area.

And so to Sunday evening, and the break down of the layout went very smoothly, and the van was all packed up 90 minutes after the show closed.  We helped Richard pack and retired for the night.   A more civilised start to the day coming home, 6:15am breakfast, and we left at 6:45am.  The drive home was easy, as we took the autoroutes, just seeing some snow in central France.  We arrived at the Eurotunnel well early, and were able to get a shuttle half an hour earlier than booked.  And we were back in Redhill 13 hours after departing from Stuttgart.

One interesting sight on route was areas of trees festooned by mistletoe (or something very similar.)  I’ve never seen so much around…

And that’s a potted history of the trip.  Next time I’ll start looking at the individual layouts around the hall.