Fans out in force for railway show

The 41st Warley National Model Railway Exhibition has bigger and better than ever with more than 20,000 people visiting this year's show.

Held over the weekend at the NEC in Birmingham, the event run by the Sandwell-based club welcomed railway enthusiasts of all ages through the doors and was opened by pop music producer Pete Waterman.

Mr Waterman who has been visiting the show since 1974 and got his first train set when he was three, said:"It's true to say the Warley group were the friendliest of all the Midlands railway clubs and they really do embraced you so you didn't have to say where you had been if you didn't go for weeks.

"I could probably only get to three meetings a year, but it was as if you were never far away.

"I heard about the club and went to one of the shows and it was fantastic, but more importantly the members were so enthusiastic I just got swept along with it."

Dave Milford, 61, from Worcester Street in Stourbridge, has been a member of Warley Model Railway Club for 18 years.

He got into the hobby after being a train spotter for many years and was with fellow club members exhibiting a model of the last year of the steam operation in British railways in 1968.

"I started with train spotting and when steam ended a lot of people turned to modelling what they knew.

"It's purely and simply nostalgia It's the long hot summers of he 60s, going out with a pack of sandwiches and this re-captures your youth."

John Glaze, 48, from Fordhouses in Wolverhampton had gone along with friends to exhibit a new layout called western View which depicts the Great Western locomotives in the 1920s and 30s.

"It has taken the best part of four months to complete by three people," he said. "several hundred hours of work has gone into it. The response from the public has been fantastic and within 35 minutes of opening we'd already been asked to exhibit at two events in Cornwall and South Wales."