RailEx - Day 1

Am_Fet writes:

Well, obviously a full weekend leave pass was never going to be a goer, but when MD stated he could only make it for Sunday, I quickly volunteered for Saturday.....so its a family tag team, as it were.

I rocked in Saturday afternoon and found Michael, Mish and Cabbage already setup around their "Kai Iwi" layout and hard at work, although I do think there was a severe case of discrimination involved; Obviously those will soldering irons and panel beating tools wanted nothing to do with those using adhesives, and so we sat back to back all afternoon......snobs....

Luckily Mr Laser had called through earlier in the day and dropped of a bag that, after what looked like a trip across a narrow rutted road at speed, contained several loose J and Ug jigsaws.  After taking 15 minutes to sort out and set up, I got on with it.

Or to be more precise, I didnt.  A lot of interest was shown in what I was doing by the paying punters, so in the first 2½ hours I had succeeded in finish a side and an end....and was beginning to lose my voice in the process.  I had printed out a screenshot of MD's award winning J5, and most people were astonished that the bits I was squinting at actually made up into the model pictured.  Cabbage also folded up one of his brass underframes in a spare 30 seconds and, along with his Nz120 container wagons, created a lot of interest.  More screenshots of Peters burgeoning Shapeways creations featured regularly in discussions on how our scale was being helped by technology (Here is his shapeways shop).

A few highlights:

- "So, what are you doing?"  (My answer was "Going Blind!")  (I got away with using that joke all afternoon...)

- A women and her two teenage daughters (Hello, girls!) spent a good 10 minutes talking to us before admitting her husband had his trainset in a box and in 28 years of marriage it had never made an appearance....and she dispaired if it ever would.  5 minutes after she left, said husband appeared and sheepishly admitted he'd been sent over by his wife....and then stayed for 10 minutes himself!

- Michael nearly getting into fisticuffs with one of those "special people" who inhabit exhibitions (although, apparently, not as many as follow steam excursions which seem to double as Asbergers Conventions) over what scale we were modelling in...."So, its 3mm?" "No, its 1/120"....apparently its all the Poms fault (of which this gentlemen was one) and their inability to do scale conversions properly when it came to make model trains.

- Giving away my meagre collection of business cards (okay, I only had 3!) to serious punters who I hope to hear back from.

- Mish producing (as if from nowhere) a 44 gallon drum of V (or similar sized can) just when it was required.

Lowlights?

-Can people please stop using sound???????????  PLEASE???????  Sure, it looks great when you stop and look at it for 20 seconds, but hearing a f***ing CHUFF CHUFF CHUFF noise for 4 hours would have St Francis of Assisi kicking babies....I think it was the monotony more than anything else.

-Realising that I couldnt remember how to put together my own kit (Doh!).  Only had to backtrack twice.....

- Getting a sore back from a bad chair....plus I think I've picked up some communicable disaease, probably from the aforementioned strange punters.

Well, no doubt MD will provide a writeup of todays experiences....and regrettably I have no photos to show you, as no one thought to capture on film the rare sight of me actually doing some modelling (what were they thinking!).  So I'll leave you with a shot of Cabbage providing a creche service to some children of a stall owner....although whether youd get creche registered that involved soldering irons is a bit doubtful....although we only had 1 minor burn from a soldering iron (something you only do once!).