All the Fun of the Toy Train Fair

So, I went to that toy train fair on Saturday, ended up spending a couple of enjoyable hours there.  There was lots to get nostalgic about, with lots of sixties and seventies model railway stuff both running on the layouts and on sale on the many trade stalls.  I even bought a couple more utility vans from one of the traders there.  When you model the Southern Railway or BR Southern Region you can never have enough GUVs and CCTs - virtually every passenger train seemed to have at least one of either as part of their formation.  Speaking of the traders who attended the fair, I have to say that their prices on second hand stuff was, by and large, far more realistic than those being sought on eBay.  Bearing in mind that, as I gathered from the traders at the fair, business for them has been down of late, is it any wonder that many of those over priced items on eBay are going unsold, with no bids at all on them?  But enough of the second hand model railway equipment, lets get to the main reason I was there: the trains themselves.  I was pleased to find that, unlike a regular model railway exhibition, the layouts on display at the train fair weren't all exhibition standard permanent layouts (the same ones you often see from exhibition to exhibition), where you are lucky if you see a single train move every hour.  The emphasis was on actually running trains (and lots of them) on 'loose laid' layouts, where the track isn't permanently fixed down and scenery is minimal.

I didn't take any pictures or video - not only did just not feel right to be doing so, but I was too busy watching the trains.  There were a couple of large 'loose laid' OO layouts I particularly liked, one was a two rail Hornby Dublo based layout (unusual, as most Dublo layouts at exhibitions are three rail, indeed, there was another three rail Dublo layout there, one well known on the exhibition circuit).  The other was a Triang Hornby based layout utilising, if I'm not mistaken, the old Triang Super 4 track.  The great thing about Super 4, which hasn't been produced since the early seventies, when it was superceded by System Six, which, in effect, is still the standard Hornby track system, is that the rails have such a deep profile that even very old models with coarse wheel sets are able to run on it.  I've often thought that I should have used it on my layout for this very reason - you can obtain large quantities of it very cheaply and it looked much better than I remembered it from when I was a kid.  But it wasn't all OO scale layouts - there were a couple of Triang TT3 based layouts, vintage Hornby O Gauge, American Lionel trains, even some indoor live steam.  All in all a pretty interesting and entertaining line up.  Certainly, it helped lift my spirits after a pretty crappy week.  If nothing else, it solidified my feelings that it is this older model railway stuff, from the sixties, seventies and early eighties which interests me most, rather than the new super-detailed stuff, and that's what my own layout needs to focus on.