Magnet powered

With so many locomotives it would be impossible to memorise the position of each one and track them all over the course of an exhibition weekend, so Steve has come up with an ingenious solution involving one large magnet and lots of small fridge magnets.

“What I’ve done is drawn the track plan onto the large magnet and written each locomotive’s number onto a smaller magnet. Whenever I move a model all I have to do is pick up the relevant magnet and move it to the new position. This has proved invaluable at shows, particularly when there are a lot of locomotives on the layout and half of them are facing away from me.

“I use an ADM turntable which is great because you’re able to programme it to know where it is in relation to each track. All I have to do is select the track I want and it will automatically stop exactly in place, eliminating the human error that would inevitably creep in after several hours of operation. I originally used a different brand but had some problems with it, so when I met the ADM team at an exhibition and had a long conversation with them, I bought one and haven’t looked back since.

“While ‘Seven Ash’ is a 1960s and 1970s layout – so in theory I could showcase anything over a 20-year period – I’ve added the cab onto the end of the turntable, which helps to place it more in the late 1970s. This was installed when the workers ran into difficulties in 1976. You may recall that was the year in which we had the lengthy heatwave in the UK, and it was also the year the motor on the turntable broke, so it had to be operated by hand. I dread to think what it would have been like for the workers who had to do that in the heat of the day!”