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Britfest 2019 - A Celebration of British Modelling

Image of MARK HOLLAND.MARK HOLLAND reports back from our Britfest event last weekend.

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It was a sunny West Sussex Sunday that saw us host another of our annual one-day events, Britfest.

I will start by apologising for the lack of 'punters' in many of the accompanying pictures, but it was so busy to start with none of us managed to get any photos! Britfest is a little "celebration" of the British railway part of our business, bringing together the brands and gauges/scales you would be familiar with and others that you may not know or thought about.

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We as always have our shop layout on display, which over the last few months has been changed to represent a 1980s station and town - with new buildings, vehicles and rolling stock. This layout is permanently on display so can be viewed on any day that you wish to visit. You may have seen many parts of this layout as the subject of articles in other RIGHT LINES articles.

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A guest layout in OO9 was the Brown & Stickwell Treacle Works, was brought along by Martin Lovell and his son Matt. This shows off what you can achieve with a narrow-gauge layout in a relatively modest space. Running on it was a collection of hand-built items and locos and rolling stock from Roco, Peco, and MiniTrains. You may know Martin or Matt from the many shows that they attend or from visiting our shop where Martin is one of our shop staff.

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There was a layout which I was building, and was hoping to be finished by Britfest but unfortunately I was beaten by the clock. You may have seen some work-in-progress pictures on our Instagram feed. A 12ft by 1ft O Scale layout using a simple end-to-end track plan, controlled by a Roco Z21 wireless digital system. Showing you don’t necessarily require a huge amount of space to have fun with this larger scale, a scale that is becoming ever more popular with the availability of an ever-expanding range of ready to run locos and rolling stock from the likes of Dapol and Heljan.

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We also had a simple table top layout using Kato N Scale Unitrack, this had a Kato K10-1295 Eurostar running around it continuously all day, showing off the ease by which an out of the box layout can be put together in mere minutes using the simple 'snap fit' track and the reliability of a brand not normally associated with British railway modelling.

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Especially popular was the scenic demo area with a make-and-take table, its popularity may have been something to do with it being outside on our front lawn in the sunshine, but I’ll let you be the judge of that! This let you get to grips with a Kestrel N Scale building and the Noch and Gaugemaster ranges of flocks, trees, and many other scenic items. A popular demo was the use of the Noch Gras-Master 2.0 Static Grass Applicator, showing how using this tool can really make static grass/flock live up to its potential.

All in all, a busy fun day albeit a little warm (so much for rainy Bank Holiday weekends!). We will now be looking forward to our next event day, AUTOFEST, which is our slot car day coming up on Sunday 26th October. Hopefully see you there or at one of our other event days next year.

YouTube channel 'Trains in the Attic' also reviewed the show, you can see their video below!

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