visit to a railway show

We went today to the East Anglia Garden Railway Show at Bressingham.  The gardens have a steam museum anyway, on account of Alan Bloom being a steam enthusiast, and they had flung open their doors to other steam fans for the weekend, so there were model layouts, trade stands, quite a few people driving about on miniature traction engines, and what the programme described as a variety of Street Organs playing around the museum site.

I hadn't realised there were so many full sized trains at Bressingham.  Some belong to the museum, and we should be grateful to Alan Bloom and his ilk for buying them in the 1970s when they might otherwise have gone for scrap.  Some were on loan from the National Railway Museum, which surprised me until I thought that they have only limited display space at York, and are presumably custodians of more engines than they can have on show at any one time, so lending some out to other museums where they can be seen by the public and will be safe makes sense.  One of the steam locomotives at Bressingham was designed to pull the commuter services out of Liverpool Street and so had the ability to accelerate and brake quickly, to help keep up a decent average speed despite the large number of stops.  It was quite advanced for the times, when most railway companies used superannuated long distance rolling stock on the commuter services.  Alas, how times have changed.  Abellio Greater Anglia racked up 2,000 hours of delays this July, and cancelled almost fifty trains.

The model layouts and trade stands were the real draw for the Systems Administrator, who quickly bought a gas filler for the home railway, some steam oil, a model crane, and some tiny signs.  I liked the layouts, though it spoils the effect when their operators don't drive the trains at a scale speed.  It looks silly, not to mention the ensuing derailments.  I probably didn't appreciate the ingenuity of the engineering as much as I would have if I knew more about quite how technically difficult it is to make an engine that's only six inches long run off actual steam, albeit gas powered and not coal fired.

The miniature traction engines were coal fired, and gave the site a nice whiff of coal smoke.  I thought that for the SA's garden railway it would be worth running a coal burner of some sort just upwind of the layout when trains were steaming, just for the smell.  The variety of Street Organs played, but were very British about taking it turns, rather than all letting rip at once.  They did have to compete with the steam powered roundabout, which as well as two rows of horses to ride upon had an inner circle of ostriches and roosters.

Playing at trains is a man's game, though.  I saw a female operative on one layout, who was definitely a hobbyist in her own right and not simply a model railway WAG because she was talking about how she had three coach building kits on the go at once and was holding back on starting yet another project, but she was the only one.  I suppose that's simply how life is, just as the only Zumba class I ever went to, which was in theory open to all, was in practice attended entirely by ladies.