The Exhibition Experience
A couple of times in the past twelve months I’ve been involved in discussions that started with sentences along the lines of: “Well that was disappointing. There wasn’t anything very new or that I haven’t seen before. There hasn’t really been a good layout since (insert your own preference of scale, gauge or prototype here)...” These sentences, almost always delivered by someone I know who has just visited a model railway exhibition, always get my attention because I rarely feel like this after attending a show.
Even if there are no layouts in my own scale and gauge, I almost always find something to inspire me and I often meet an old friend I haven’t seen for a while at the show and can catch up with over a coffee. Just as common, when I enquire about an exhibition I was unable to attend in person, is the reply “Not very good, too many trade stands...” The exact proportion of trade stands to layouts is never specified, so I must assume it’s some golden mean that exists only in the mind of this critical exhibition attendee.
If you take this to an extreme and combine these two assessments of exhibitions, then a really good exhibition is actually impossible: as there hasn’t been a good layout since (insert your own preference of scale, gauge or prototype here) and as there are always too many trade stands; even if there were no trade stands the layouts weren’t worth a second glance anyway! Hence a ‘good’ exhibition is forever out of reach.
I suppose one could pose the question, , but the obvious rejoinder would be to ask what done to achieve this same outcome. While I can’t claim to have set the world on fire with the quantity of my exhibition layout
