STUART JORDAN visits this local model railway club show.
It's always slightly surreal going back to your old school as an adult, but that's what I did last weekend when I visited the Bognor Regis Model Railway Club's annual exhibition at Felpham Community College.
The Bognor club have been around since 1985 and even have their own signal box at their club house in Aldingbourne! For more details about clubs in our area, see our Club Hub.
There were a good variety of layouts on show, covering various different scales and periods. Let's take a look at some of them (in no particular order).
We start off with this nice little ON30 Scale American limeworks set in the 1920s. This layout is designed to be viewed from three different sides.
This layout shows off how effective a layout can look with minimal buildings and lots of trackwork. It is based on Holbeck Shed in Leeds.
Bradwell Point is set between 1994 and 2004 and represents a fictitious nuclear flask unloading point in the north.
This lovely little 7mm layout depicts a 2'3" narrow gauge railway serving a tar distillery, somewhere in the south of England in the 1950s. There were lots of lovely little details on this layout.
This Locomotive Inspection Point is set in a fictitious location somewhere near Glasgow and is set from 1970 to the present. The layout was being run by Z21 and I also spotted the Train Tech Smart Screen in operation on the platform.
Points Mill is set in the New England state of Vermont, and depicts in N Scale a depot and branch served by Budd Rail Cars - a personal favourite locomotive of mine.
This layout was built by the thriving Junior section of the Bognor club.
This 0.165 Gauge layout depicts a brewery in the early 1970s. The chap displaying it also had some box-file layouts on show that he had built, which shows what you can achieve in a limited space.
Wentworth Shed is a veteran of the 2018 Gaugemaster Open Weekend, so it was good to see that it was still going strong.
Built in OO Scale, Upner Down is an end-to-end Network SouthEast layout.
This lovely O Scale layout depicts an ex-Great Eastern goods yard in the early days of British Railways.
The crowning glory of the show for me was this 3mm layout built by Bognor Club members. It is over 30ft long and includes a fictitious area of Portsmouth from Portsmouth and Southsea station to Portsmouth Harbour. All of the rolling stock is hand-built.
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PS - We've tried to make sure that all of the layout details are correct. If there are any errors or omissions, let us know in the usual way and we can correct the article.