Page 14 - NMRA Roundhouse July-August 2018

Black Diamonds on Tour
Alexander Clark
The PH&LF modular group from the Netherlands invited Black Diamonds to join them in the Station N-spoor exhi- bition at the Dudok Arena, Hilversum on the 26 / 27th May.
Planning for the event started well
in advance, between the two groups we had a 14m x 7m space to fill,
it was decided that the Black Dia- monds junction would form the centre piece with Bunshill and a PH&LF module providing two other branch- es. Assembling of modules started the month previous at the Mech Models open day meeting with the final inventory of modules, stock, electrics all put together a few days before along with Mech models
stock to fill their sales stand which were the last main items to be shoe horned into Steve Dennison’s van. Travel to Hilversum was a bit like the opening credits to Dad’s army, David Mathews travelled up from Worces- ter by train to join Steve Dennison, Steve Quick with the van to travel to Harwich on the Wednesday evening to stay overnight before catching the Thursday morning ferry to Hook of
Holland, there was no space left for a van on the Thursday night ferry due to the Bank holiday weekend, Barry James, Jim and Andrew Dickinson travelled down on Thursday after- noon to catch the Thursday night ferry, there was space for a car. John Burns and his wife Barbara were on holiday in the Northumberland so caught the Thursday
night ferry from Newcas-
tle to Amsterdam and
I took the KLM “ferry”
from Leeds Bradford
Airport to Schiphol Air-
port with a train ride to
Hilversum, armed with
the NS app on my phone
I spent the day stop-
ping off at stations en
route to do some Dutch
train watching. Like a
well-rehearsed show we all arrived at the venue for 15:45, I walked round the corner to See Steve trying to go down a one way bus route and nearly had the van speared by a rising traffic bollard, disaster averted we started unloading at 16:00 with help from PH&LF. With a bit of shuffling here and there we finally positioned
the Junction and started building away from it, by 18:00 as the final parts were being added, the main breaker was thrown and power was on, work contin- ued at a pace with cabling, rail joiners and scenery all being added. By 20:00 we had nearly a fully running 8 scale route miles of layout, the
only problems being the branch off
of Bunshill module had a short, the Loco net repeater on Bunshill module had decided to fry itself and the point module from the single track at the end of the Grain module on to the double track Q tower module had also decided to fry itself. At this point we were ejected from the hall and
retired to the hotel for a cold drink, food and a shower, not necessarily in that order.
Saturday morning came along and by 09:00 the short on the branch
at Bunshill had been sorted and a temporary switch installed to operate the tortoise motor between Q Tower and the grain modules, with the lay- out now running smoothly it was time to look around the rest of the show, this consisted of a mix of N scale layouts, some quite large and all continental themed. Most of the trade offered a various mix of continental used or new stock, other than Mech models that unfortunately were diag- onally opposite us in the hall. David Mathews had been suffering from sea sickness symptoms and by late Saturday afternoon had got slightly
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14 ROUNDHOUSE - August 2018