Last weekend I drove over to Tolworth to attend the annual Hampton Court Model Railway Society show, held at the Tolworth Recreation Centre.
The show is one of the larger ones and takes up three halls of the center, with a good selection of layouts and traders, and a dedicated room for the American Layouts.
This years main attraction for US outline fans was undoubtedly the Menasha, WI layout owned by Martin Franklin. I saw this layout at last years NEC show and it really is a stunning example of modern US modelling, with some beautifully detailed scenery and Wisconsin Central rolling stock.
Also in attendance were Beaver Creek, a Canadian Pacific layout set in the 1960's presented by Jack Bennell. The layout packed a lot of detail into it's narrow shelf baseboards, and some very nicely detailed buildings complete with interiors.
The Z Gauge Blackrock Colorado depicted a coal mining region with plenty of trains running and some nicely detailed scenes, including a working drive-in movie theatre.
The rest of the layouts were mainly UK outline, but some of them were very nice indeed, I was especially impressed by the D-Day setting of Rowlands Castle, with dozens of military vehicles and figures set up to recreate the de-training stations set up for American and Canadian troops arriving to prepare for D-Day.
The overall standard of the layouts was extremely high, and I expect several of these will be present at next weeks NEC show.
I really enjoyed the show, and although it would have been nice to see a larger US turnout, there was plenty to see and the HCMRS once again provided a great day out.
