The Hobart Model Train Show has been a regular outing for me for a good many years. I don’t often miss it. If you have read more than a couple of posts on this blog you will know that railways has been a big part of my family life. Naomi, David and I all worked for the railways at one time, we all loved railway excursions especially on steam engines and we all loved model trains.

On Saturday Naomi and I made the trip to the Tasmanian Transport Museum for this years event.

This year I have focussed more on the scenery than the trains though as I love miniature scenes.

An acquaintance of ours was one of the exhibitors . Historian Peter Fielding from Oatlands has a display every year. His models are usually based on scenes from World War One and are always incredibly detailed for such tiny things. Peter likes to educate and entertain the many children that come to see the trains so he usually sets up some funny little scenes for them to find in his diorama. This year his scene was “The Desert War 1916-1918” . We thought it was the best display he’s done.

Most of this years layouts had terrific scenery and we thought that the backdrops were particularly well done as well. This one reminded me of the sort of scenery that I’d see when we travelled around by train when I was a child in England. Naomi said it reminded her of “Coronation Street”.

This was part of a very pretty little railway set in the Welsh countryside.

The scene below I edited very slightly. I thought that the painted industrial  buildings in the background were very well done. I just removed a line where two panels had been joined together which was a bit distracting.

Both Naomi and I have fond memories of Hornby trains from our childhood. I had a station and platform that looked a lot like the one in the picture on the left. These two photos are of a Triang Hornby railway circa 1955. My Horny train set was from about 1963-4

A Triang Honby model railway.

Above is a clockwork train set. The buildings are all biscuit and tea tins but they fit in really well.

There were also some larger miniature steam locomotives and two full-sized ones in steam, one giving rides up and down a stretch of track inside the museum. Of course it was impossible not to think of David as we attended so many of these things together. He would have been fascinated to see locomotive C22 which we had not seen in steam on previous visits. Here is one last  photo that I took of David at the 2014 show, the last one he attended with me.