The Friday night before an exhibition always seems to go the same for me - I finally get time to start preparing the CD's that we'll be giving away (Talyllyn 1.5 and Deltic Collection were new this time around) and then I'm up until nearly 5am Saturday morning getting that job finished. Still, they looked good for first run versions so it was definitely worth it. Now that i've done a test run of the CD's they are about ready to go in to normal "production" so that folks can order them.

By the time I'd got to Beaconsfield the others were already there and waiting for me with the rest of the equipment, I was only about half an hour late on two hours of sleep so I wasn't doing so bad :)

Very kindly helping us out from the community were Martin Soilleux-Cardwell (saddletank), Pat Dalton (pdeee), Martin Heywood (MartinH) and Malcolm Roper (gricer) - so we had a fantastic showing of the best of Train Simulation there to talk to people. Pat brought the latest version of his Skipton-Carlisle extension which is looking particularly fantastic with the latest work from Malcolm - you're all definitely in for a big treat with that one. MartinH was developing and running some activities on it as people watched and saddletank was talking to people, doing some driving (including melting some plugs on Kim's latest Schools class), and demoing Talyllyn.

If you have not yet obtained Pat's Settle and Carlisle 1930's CD then head on over to the information page (link on the menu) and find out how to get it now - you'll be impressed, trust me :)

We also gave Trainz a bit more exposure this time around, now that Service Pack 3 is out I felt it was time to give it a bit more of a show and see how it went down with folk that probably already knew about Train Sim but may well have never even heard of Trainz yet. Suffice to say it went down extremely well. As everybody at the exhibition was a modeller in some way, demonstrating the creation of a layout to them before their eyes including bridges, gradients, water, hills, valleys and so forth resulted in a lot of impressed people. Trainz and Train Sim cater to different aspects of the market and judging by the response we got to the two or three hours of Trainz shown I think it will be worth including in future demonstrations as well, particularly as more custom stock and routes become available.

We were placed at the back of the hall on the stage which meant that anybody in the room could very clearly see all of the screens in action. Most of the visitors came to see what we were doing and we ended up with four or five invitations to other exhibitions as a reslt - full details of our exhibition plans are now available to view by selecting "Exhibition Diary" from the menu on the left hand side.

Lunch was made more interesting as Pat, Malcolm, Martin (saddletank) and myself sat down with another CMRA member - it became clear reasonably quickly that this gentleman was not happy about Train Simulators. The whole conversation raised the interesting question of whether Train Simulators are continuing the decline to the world of Model Railways, which in his view it very much was. In our view however, we see that not only is it not going to hurt the world of Model Railways we believe it's probably going to have the opposite effect as more and more younger people discover the railways in their PC and then as they get slightly older (and have the funds to do so) they are more likely to investigate having their own Model Railway.

One younger member, Aaron Parkyn, sat at our stand for quite some time learning how to drive the trains. One thing he proved was that while the younger generation might initially be interested in "how fast can it go" and "can I crash it", it doesn't take more than a couple of such events before they start wondering "how can I drive it properly?". Aaron had a great time with various loco's on various routes before ending up on the Settle and Carlisle learning how to drive Steam locos.

The CD's went like hotcakes - we took 11 copies of Northern Rail Routes, 20 copies of ECML 3, 20 copies of Mark Shipmans new Deltic CD and 20 copies of the new Talyllyn route with rolling stock and activities. We came away with a mere 11 CD's left.

Having Pat and MartinH in the same place was very interesting to watch. As MartinH was trying to write an activity he ran in to some problems with the beta version of the route - which Pat then sat down to, fired up the Route Editor and worked on fixing, allowing Martin to then continue writing his activity.

It was also good to meet up with a couple of other forum members such as Tim Hitch (mirrlees).

All in all it was an extremely enjoyable day, the CMRA put on a superb exhibition and it was a pleasure to take part.

I'd like to sign off with thanks to the four guys for taking the time to travel down and help out, very much appreciated!

Remember that future exhibition dates are present on the Exhibition Diary page, including a copy of our "notes for organisers". If you would like us to take part in your exhibition then please do drop Leviathan1949 (leviathan1949@uktrainsim.com) a note and we'll get it organised.