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The usual warm welcome as we arrived at the Connaught Leisure Centre bright and early on the Saturday morning. With
the Kuju Team joining us we had a slightly larger area to work with. With Doug, Laurie and Callum ably assisting we
were quickly set up and ready to run. Members of e-rail joined us shortly afterwards to do their setting up of their
route South Western Lines. Great Eastern was already installed on one laptop and a third laptop was set up to run
with MSTSBIN.
A large number of UKTS members visited over the weekend to help with the stand and to take the opportunity to drive
South Western Lines, Great Eastern and Westvale (Neptune50006's almost completed route, CD coming soon). We also had
a demo running of the Class 89 pack put together by the 3 commercial developers - BlueArrowTS, Europeanbahn and
Making Tracks. Visitors / Demonstrators included Doug Kightley, LAD491 (Laurie), callumpresley (Callum),
Mole259 (Adrian), Trains2 (Rich), Coxster (Damon), sebve (Harold), ccsdc (Dave), Neptune50006 (Gary), King125 (Terry),
ianm42 (Ian), thenudehamster (Barry), champy (Jon), Damian2 (Mark), Phill70 (Glyn), yj03ppv (John), Decapod (Paul).
Sorry if I have missed you out. Thanks to all for coming along and helping out.
As always this exhibition is top notch, spread out across 3 large rooms and the foyer. A wide variety of gauges,
scales, liveries and eras to suit most tastes. Plenty of trade stands also meant plenty of opportunity to buy the
necessaries to keep the modeller occupied through the winter evenings ready for the next years exhibitions. My only
reservation concerning layouts is the raising of the layouts to heights such that they are at EYE LEVEL. Great if you
are five foot three but not otherwise. There is growing concern that the younger generation are not joining the
clubs in goodly numbers. Perhaps clubs should consider lowering their layouts to the EYE LEVEL of the younger
generation so that they can SEE the layout properly.
Our thanks to Paul Martin (Exhibition Manager) ably assisted by Noel Lever and Mike Brown and the Farnham & District
Club for the invitation, the refreshments and making us welcome. Thanks to all the UKTS members who joined us to help
demonstrate or visited us for a drive and / or a chat. See you all again in 2007.
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