According to Chris…
Chris has an important update concerning his Barnwell exhibition.
After a lifetime in model railway journalism, I like to present an air of professionalism. That means producing one’s written work on time, to the correct length and in house style. This column is easy. I often have several of these pages written up in advance and that was certainly the case this month. It was the first page of this issue to be designed, having been delivered by me on the first day of the production schedule.
I should have realised that I was tempting fate. My text was all about Barnwell village’s Railway Children Day and about preparing my layouts for the show on May 23. It was also a preview of the event and an opportunity to publicise it. As a fundraiser for our village church, we needed it. We had a section of medieval retaining wall collapse in the wet weather earlier this year and the repair will be expensive.
In the few weeks between writing it and delivering my column, the prospects for success changed dramatically and no sooner had my page been designed than it became clear that the Railway Children Day would have to be cancelled. It is one of hundreds – probably thousands – of events, which have fallen, and continue to fall, victim to the Covid-19 virus outbreak. I had been due to exhibit my Cornish harbour layout, ‘Polwyddelan’, at Egham & Staines Model Railway Society’s exhibition on March 21. The society took the decision to postpone the show just a couple of weeks beforehand, at least in part because of the high number of their own club members who are in that ‘at risk’ over-70 age group.
That cancellation really concentrated my mind. Initially, I was disappointed. ‘Polwyddelan’ has spent the past two years as a talking point in the Model Rail office. In order to check it over and prepare it for exhibition I had enlisted help to get it home and crammed it into the last remaining room in my house that wasn’t already crammed with bits of the ‘O’ gauge ‘Railway Children’ layout, receiving rather more substantial overhaul ready for May 23. I finished the preparation of ‘Polwyddelan’ just minutes before I received the news that the Egham show was cancelled. Disappointment soon turned to relief when I gave it some thought. At 73 years old and with a background of childhood asthma,
I’m one of those who needs to be careful.
Since then, I know Model Railõs editorial assistant Jane Skinner has received requests to cancel several more shows from our Exhibition Diary page. The virus crisis will hit model railway clubs and model railway businesses hard. Many clubs rely on the income from their exhibition to fund their activities. I haven’t been on the committee at Egham for the past quarter-century, since I moved away from the area, but I know we used to cover the clubhouse running expenses from subscriptions and the exhibition income funded the construction of layouts. The layouts earned their keep by being exhibited. I suspect that many clubs operate in a similar fashion. Take out the exhibition and you’ve knocked over the first domino in the club’s finances.
As I write this revised version of my page we are being told to refrain from mixing socially. For the over-70s it is suggested that they stay away from any such gatherings for 12 weeks. I know that clubs are not everyone’s cup of tea. Some modellers prefer to work in isolation. The hobby is a broad church with room for all, but clubs and club exhibitions underpin the hobby in a way that the remoteness of social media cannot match. We need our clubs and our club shows and just as the hobby rallied round the Market Deeping club after its 2019 exhibition was trashed by vandals, so we need to rally round our clubs this summer. Once this immediate crisis is over, many may need some financial help and support before they can even think about putting on another show. Let’s make sure they get it.