Wednesday morning, we didn’t hurry into the exhibition centre.  We knew that our modules had to join on the end of German, Finnish and Spanish club sections.  We also left Maxine to have a slow day, pottering and visiting the local Aldi and Lidl stores, to see what real German ones looked like.

We should, of course, have known better.  The German club arrived about mid-day and were quickly putting up their modules.  The Finns arrived in due course, but the word was that the Spanish had had a five our delay in Munich, and wouldn’t arrive till after 5pm.  Their modules were there, in large packing cases, as they had been delivered on the Monday.  The hall closed for the night at 8pm.

We muttered a bit and thought about it, but decided that since we were on the end of the line, we could easily set up our 32′ or so of modules on the Thursday morning before the show opened.  After all, that’s what we do in half-an-hour on club nights, isn’t it.  Besides, we had a table booked at a beer house/restaurant for 6:30pm.

So we left for dinner, in the centre of Echterdingen.  I’d never been there before, and there were some pretty old (or reconstructed) buildings and a fine church.

The restaurant had a good atmosphere, and the beer and the food were also excellent.  We obviously made the right choice abandoning the Messe for dinner.

Thursday morning we were in the hall as it opened at 8am, and all modules were set up and working by 9:30am.  The show opened at 10.  We had one small electrical hiccup, when we forgot to add the insulated fishplates between sections.  This was not surprising – my N-Club modules had worked last year, and two of them had been to TINGS.  Most of the the N-mod modules are in regular use at club nights. 

We then operated trains all day, though I slipped back to the hotel to collect Maxine, who had spent the morning exploring again.  The modules ran very well for the four days.  We had the occasional derailment, but relatively few considering the wide variety of trains that ran over our tracks.

Playing trains is quite hard work, but the NCI show isn’t all hard labour. On the Thursday evening there is a ‘booth party’ – a sort of lock in – where all the exhibitors set up a table with some local delicacies. So you can enjoy an excellent chilli from the German US railroad modellers, Swiss raclette and Toblerone, lots of interesting cheese, pastries and wine from all over Europe. The hard core can head to the Danish and Finnish tables for raw curried herring, vodka and schnapps!

For the second year Allan and Richard set up the Old English Tea shop, with proper cups of tea, Tunnock tea cakes, Cornish pasties, Walkers crisps and the like. All well received, though a certain amount of education was required for our European friends into the mysteries of pasties.  Unfortunately Brexit prevents us from bringing our traditional barrel of Sussex ale, but Sean managed to smuggle in two small party kegs, that soon disappeared. 

To finish today, here are the intrepid ESNG team, Richard, Derek, Jon, Sean and Allan!

Next post, I’ll post about the modules.