Report & photos from the Albury ScaleSeven Spring Meeting, April 26th 2025

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Report & photos from the Albury ScaleSeven Spring Meeting, April 26th 2025

I think I can honestly say that we all had a great day at the spring meeting. Attendance was excellent with a total number in the region of 55 to 60 people during the course of the day. As ever it’s a great chance to catch-up with old friends and to meet up with new faces. As always seems to be the case we have a few non-Scale 7 modellers who come along and enjoy finding out what we do and join in the general railway modelling conversation. We continue to work on them to join our group and have been successful with a couple in the last year. As in previous years some of our members came quite considerable distances to be with us; thank you very much for doing this.

It's always good to have a demonstration track at these meetings and this year Ian Norman brought along his new layout, Newbourne, which is under construction. It is a circular layout, approximately 16 feet in diameter and in Ian’s best tradition is built on his lightweight construction principles. He has shown yet again that for a layout to be stable and sturdy it doesn’t need excessively-sized pieces of timber. I asked him if the scenics would be fully completed for next year; suffice to say the reply wasn’t really printable!

We were delighted to have the late John Watson’s layout, Cratfield, on display. This is now in the safe hands of Tony Goff who has worked hard to get back it into suitable condition to exhibit.

He was also able to borrow some of Johns original locos and rolling stock to use on the day.

Cratfield provided constant interest during the whole of the day and even at one point some interlopers running on it. Thank you very much Tony for bring this icon along to our meeting.

Further Cratfield photos below

Some of you may been following a thread on Western Thunder about building pointwork using Templot and 3D printing. The thread has been started by John Jones known as Hayfield on the forum. John was kind enough to accept our invitation to come along to Albury in order to talk about and demonstrate this possible breakthrough in track construction. The chairs in front of his table were constantly occupied throughout the day and all who chatted with him came away suitable impressed by what he was able to show us.

As a result of John’s attendance David Rayner was able to have a day-off from demonstrating his 3d drawing and printing skills. However, he did bring along examples of 3d printed track gauges which included his version of the mint gauge. He continues to produce further gauges to simplify point construction, all of which are used on Love Lane.

Richard Gawler, who is also a regular poster on Western Thunder in a thread, The Heybridge Railway 1889-1913 gave a fascinating insight to his modelling of a fictional light railway located in Essex as it might have been in the 1890s and 1900s.

The Love Lane layout was also available to view in its home location with a steady stream of visitors making the short journey to see it.

Mark Wood, Mark Wood Wheels, kindly joined us again with his large range of wheel castings. These are really the best that I have seen and recommend anyone who would like cast iron wheels to explore his list.

John Borkowski of Masterpiece Models, www.masterpiecemodels.co.uk and our chairman brought along a selection of his superb models.

Our youngest demonstrator brought along his model railway.

Paul Stokes tells us that he had an excellent day of sales from the S7 stores. Thank you, Paul, for your hard work in supporting us at Albury.

As ever, we had the Love Lane ‘previously loved’ second hand stall where a large quantity of surplus models, tools and books went to new homes. Some of the sales from the later Bob Goddens collection will be donated to charity.

Further photos of Cratfield

Now here comes the thanks;

A huge thank you to our catering team led by Janet for keeping us fed and watered throughout the day. Janet and her volunteers have got it down to a fine art.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the help and support of the Love Lane team, thank you to you all.

And finally thankyou to all who came along to support the event in whatever way, it really is appreciated. Now off to figure out what to do next year.

Tim Humphreys

(all photos by the author)

Some more photos of the show have been contributed by Rod Hall: