We had a pretty full crew from UKTrainSim - with Mandy (Kyra) and Steve (DeLancie) also coming along. We were also joined by EddieF who spent plenty of time with a huge crowd behind him as he demonstrated various aspects of Train Simulator including building models with Train Sim Modeller.

Steve was primarily demonstrating Ultimate Trainz, it's the one he's most familiar with and has been building a route in it. The Surveyor route building tool was brought out many times to impressed audiences.

The two primary demonstrations were of Microsoft Train Simulator, up on the projection screens. There were a few times when one screen or the other switched to Trainz but for the majority of the time MSTS was the primary focus.

We had a couple of extra special things to demonstrate, including the latest version of Ruabon-Llangollen-Barmouth in its new 'self install' format that Gordon and Alan have been busily working on. It's a very impressive route indeed and really does install about as easily as you can get, there's a few activities that we found good fun to get you going from the word go too.

In addition, we also had the latest HST 125 from Dave Babb, also in GNER livery from Horgy. Ollie had also repainted my Mark 2F TSO coaches in to a selection of liveries (not yet released) and they featured in an activity that i'd prepared for the day.

The exhibition itself initially looked like it was going to be fairly unpleasant - we arrived promptly and then, carrying heavy equipment, we went in to the huge building and asked the security guard where the toilets were (our stand was very close to them) - he didn't know and sent us on a wild goose chase around the wrong end of the building before finally we managed to track them down ourselves. When we went to the organisation desk to get tables and chairs, we were told that we could only have two chairs (which for 6 demonstrators wasn't going to be sufficient) but we twisted some arms and four more turned up shortly afterwards. We also only had three meal tickets for the evening meal, again it turns out that they had emailed something saying that we should have contacted them beforehand if the three weren't enough so we skipped the evening meal and popped out to a Little Chef for a mixed grill in the evening.

Once the initial headaches were over things settled down nicely and we were able to get down to 'business'. My machine decided that it wouldn't work with the projector via VGA anymore and sadly i'd left the SVideo dongle behind - Steve came to the rescue as he had remembered his, so nice one Steve! Later on Saturday, Steve's machine gave up the ghost for what looked like a permanent death - fortunately he gave it a try again at the end of Saturday and it sprang back in to life, we can only assume it got a tad overheated (which isn't surprising, the room we were in was quite hot).

The crowds to the exhibition were unimaginable - and we saw most of them crowded around our stand as well. At one point Steve and Mandy went off to get lunches for us and when they came back they could barely get into the room we were in because of the sheer number of people watching.

Saturday was the busiest day, but Sunday wasn't far off it - though where Saturday was quite a constant large stream of people, Sunday was more bursts of people.

A good number of 'famous faces' from the community turned up to say Hi, including DrkAngel, Crompton, Mirlees and many many more that I can't even remember at the moment (apologies!). Many thanks to all of you for popping in, it's always great to see the people behind the names.

RailDriver featured quite heavily in the demonstrations, both the main machines had RailDrivers connected and being used exclusively for driving the trains. We had the occasional problem where a control would suddenly stop working in the simulator and MSTS had to be shut down and restarted - but I suspect this is down to us not using custom RailDriver cab files for the custom cabs that we were using on the trains.

I don't think anybody went away from the stand unimpressed with what they saw, such is the availability of various types of add-ons that we were able to respond quickly to various requests including Narrow Guage, Steam and so forth.

Unfortunately we've had one complaint since the exhibition that apparently someone tore their coat on a nail at our stand... Given that we didn't use any nails and all the tables were covered with exhibition supplied sheets, I don't think there is much reason to believe that it really was our stand, more that we were the most memorable. What it does mean however is that we are going to have to review our policies on letting the public sit down and play with the simulators - we generally don't have much room and that makes it more likely that either our equipment will get damaged or the person in question will get hurt if they aren't careful. We'll see!

We have been promised a prompt invite back to Doncaster next year and we're looking forward to getting back there.

All in all, it turned out to be one of the best exhibitions yet, despite an awkward start on Saturday morning. We managed to get a wander round the exhibition for ourselves on Sunday afternoon and I can definitely recommend it to anyone that is curious - the vast array of trade stands and very high quality layouts was very impressive. They can cater for pretty much every aspect of the hobby.