‘O’ GAUGE LAYOUT WEEKEND YARD
A weekend wonder
Building a layout over two days is challenging enough, but to do so in an exhibition hall takes things to a whole new level, as the Gauge O Guild discovered.
Words: Chris Gadsby
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Photography: Chris Nevard Artwork: Andrew Mackintosh
What makes this layout great?
This layout isn’t about putting in thousands of hours of painstaking modelling to accurately render a location. Rather, it’s an exercise in showing what is possible in the larger scale in a short time, and it plays its role perfectly.
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Question: is it possible to build a fully functioning layout over one weekend while at an exhibition with hundreds of people walking past you, wondering why your baseboards are bare when everything else is a completed layout with moving trains? Answer: yes, if you’re the Gauge O Guild. We’ve proven in the pages ofModel Railbefore that building a layout in a matter of days is possible, but building one over just a weekend takes speed building to a whole new level. Tasked with proving to the public that a space the size of Lake Victoria is not required for an enjoyable ‘O’ gauge layout, members Nigel Smith, Neil Podbery, Paul Bambrick, Kevin Wilson and Thomas Hoy set about planning how they could draw people into the scale and the Guild, with a bit of a different exhibition to the usual handing out of leaflets. We spoke to the now custodian of ‘Weekend Yard’ Kevin Cartwright and the Gauge O Guild’s Chairman of Events Jackie Kneeshaw about how the layout came to be, the build, and life after that first exhibition in 2023.