Friday night I picked up the various bits and pieces (Screens, his PC etc) at Dads place for the Exhibition - normally he'd bring them with him but unfortunately he had a teaching commitment on the Saturday - on the way stopping over at Kelvedon to pick up Mandy, the new team member who hates to have her photo taken - so you won't see any photo's of her here unfortunately! :)

Saturday morning I'd planned to get up at around 6.30 so that we could be out the door for 7am - unfortunately both Mandy and I slept through our alarms - she got up around 7.15 and I woke up around 7.30. Much rushing later we had the car loaded and were on the road.

The organisers at Croydon had very generously given us the entire Stage for our exhibit. This left us plenty of room to set up five PC's, with three projectors running and still have room for people to walk around and look at everything that was going on.

Helping us out on both days were pdeee, saddletank, MartinH and Decapod. The group of us got things set up reasonably quickly - with saddletank spending some time working on his machine (if you weren't watching the forums, he'd had a nasty crash of his PC and was still building his MSTS the morning of the exhibition... these things happen at the best of times :) ).

Pat (PDEEE) brought with him the latest incarnation of his Skipton to Carlisle 1920's route (and damn fine it is too!). Paul (Decapod) was there to spend the weekend working on his GWR Aberdare loco, demonstrating the creation of content for Train Sim for those that were interested in the modelling aspect - he also gave me a renewed respect for 3D Canvas, especially with his new plug-ins that he's developed. He's toying with working on another one that might just get me to go back to 3DC - but i'll let him discuss that as and when he's ready to.

Martin SC (Saddletank) brought the latest incarnation of Highworth Branch, unfortunately he has had to take the hard decision to rebuild it from scratch. It causes a complete crash of MSTS whenever you exit from an activity and he doesn't want to release it in that form - it's really sad, because the route is essentially complete aside from that issue. On the good side, he is going to try and import the world data tile at a time, so it hopefully won't be a complete rebuild. Good luck with that Martin, we're all gagging for that one to be released :)

Martin H was there demonstrating and building activities with his usual skill.

Pat and Martin SC were wearing their special custom UKTrainSim T-Shirts, if anybody else wants to get theirs ordered - click on the UKTS T-Shirts link on the left hand side for full details!

Throughout the weekend we had plenty of visitors from UKTS members, to name but a few (I apologise to any I have forgotten!): asalmon, gavinw, peterdore, southcoasttrains, horgy, steve33108, connex, buffy500 and I'm pretty sure there were a few more besides those too. A fantastic showing and it was really good to see you all. A special thanks to connex and buffy500 for stopping to help out and chat to people for a large chunk of Saturday, the extra help was much appreciated.

Some of the highlights of the day were Martin SC teaching someone all the basics of Train Simulator - before finding out that it was GavinW, and of course Gavin just let him :) Then both Martin SC and I blew our steam trains up as some kind souls changed our systems to manual firing and neglected to tell us :)

Mandy was primarily there to observe and give her opinion about what we were doing wrong, what we did right and so forth to help promote ourselves the best and make sure people went away understanding as much as possible about what they were seeing. A chunk of this is down to how we present ourselves on paper, ie in the form of the leaflets, the folders containing site information and the posters that say who we are. She came away with some really good ideas so we're hoping that we should have some of them in place to try them out at Bedford and see how that goes.

You'll occasionally spot Mandy on the forums - her username is Kyra.

Trainz got a much bigger presence at this exhibition than it has in the past too, now that it is available on the shelf I am much happier to push it at the exhibitions as another product in the Train Simulation genre (after all, we're not just about MSTS!). Trainz was received very well by everybody.

I was surpised to see the guys from my local Model Railway shop (The Engine Shed, in Leytonstone) there exhibiting one of their own layouts too, it's a small world :)

Having short and simple activities ready for people to sit down and play is still proving to work very well. Pat has given me a copy of the latest Skipton route so that I can get a few shorties prepared for Bedford as well. I am going to try and get the Ruabon-Llangollen-Bala short activities uploaded to the site as soon as I confirm what all the stock is within them so I can write sensible readme files :)

There were a few nay-sayers popping up to see what we were doing but it didn't take too long this time before they began to see that simulation wasn't taking away from the community, it might even add to it on the whole. One guy seemed very negative, saying that anyone who could use Trainz Surveyor (that's what I was using at the time) could build a real model railway - I disagreed saying that while designing the layout was the same skill, building it was a completely different skill set - not to mention the space requirements. By the time we'd finished talking while I was knocking something up fairly quickly on Surveyor he was speaking more along the lines of saying how easy it was and agreeing it might be a good way to prototype a model railway etc. Numerous other people I spoke to agreed that a lot of the younger generation would probably now start their Railway appreciation via the simulators, learn how it all works, decide what they like and then move in to scale model railways and join a club etc. All in all I don't think anyone went away feeling we were the enemy.

We received a few more invites and possible invites, including Maidstone and Leytonstone next year - and one, our Northern friends will be happy to hear, possibility in Dundee. I still haven't worked out the practical issues with an exhibition so far away but I'll worry about that when we have an invite on the table :)

A lot of people I spoke to that didn't already have Train Sim or Trainz went away ready to purchase one or the other, quite often after a son or daughter had spent 20 or 30 minutes of ecstacy driving a train and it was the only way the parent could convince the child to move on to other exhibits :) I think that Train Sim and Trainz will very likely be popular Christmas presents :)

We were hoping to be able to get hold of a RailDriver console to demonstrate but they aren't available yet, it looks like they won't be available for the Bedford exhibition either - so the first chance to see those in action will be in February at Brighton Model World. My aim is to get one and try it, and if they prove as good as they seem, get a couple more so that all the demonstrator machines have the option of using one.

Aside from pouring with rain on Sunday as we packed up the cars to go home it was a marvellous weekend. I'd like to thank the organisers at Croydon for putting on a superb exhibition and for inviting us to take part. I'd also like to repeat my thanks to everyone in the community that showed up to help out or just make an appearance - it's good to put names to faces :)

See you all at Bedford :)