Small Trains and Small Bears

Ay up, everyone!  It's Hanley Bear here, with a post about trains - very small trains.

Last week, our human friends Aunty Ann and Uncle Derek came to stay with Polar and Grizzly for a few days.  They are the very nice humans who adopted Waverley for our hug and we stayed at their house in Somerset last September.

One day during their visit, the humans went out for lunch at The Red Bull, the pub by the locks where we had Christmas Dinner with the Trent and Mersey Canal Society.  Four of us bears went with them and we had fish and chips, and Uncle Derek let me have some of his beer bubbles.

While we were at lunch, Grizzly told us we were going on to visit the model railway club he belongs to, in Alsager.  Alsager thinks it is in Cheshire but it has an ST postcode, so I think it is really part of Staffordshire.

The model railway club meet in a huge shed with room for several big layouts.  The biggest is for 'O' gauge trains, which are a bigger gauge than Grizzly's layout.

There's another layout which has much smaller tracks and trains than Grizzly's.  This little layout, which Waverley liked, is 'Z' gauge.  It's hard to make the trains and scenery look realistic at such a small scale, but the club have done really well with this one.  'Z' gauge is good if you want to do dramatic scenery, like mountains, or to run full-length trains. but don't have lots of space.

It's easier to do very detailed scenery on 'O' gauge or 'OO' layouts, like this corner of a colliery railway which is 'O' gauge.  Us bears were only able to explore the corners of the big layout, as there were no trains running on it and it was covered to keep the dust off.

We were very careful not to knock over any scenery and made sure we didn't leave fur on the tracks, as it would be very bad if it got into the workings of the engines, and we would be in trouble and not allowed to visit again.

Dudley said he really hoped we could come again when the big engines are running.  Who knows, there might even be waggons big enough to carry very small bears like him.

I went to have a look at the 'OO' layout, which is looking really great.  The modellers are using a 3-D printer to make pieces for buildings.  We hadn't seen one before and we were impressed, and it's very useful for jobs like making lots of matching window frames for factory buildings and mills.

There's a countryside section of the 'OO' gauge layout too. where Huddlesford sat until he had to move to make way for the first trains to run, to make sure everything was working after some electrical improvements.

Meanwhile, Waverley had gone to look at another layout.  This one is 'N' gauge, which is smaller than 'OO' but bigger than 'Z' gauge.  Waverley decided that he liked this layout best of all.

It's a modern layout with overhead electric power, like we have on the railways around here.  There were no trains running on this layout during our visit but you can see it's long enough to run full-length passenger and freight trains.

Most of the layouts can be taken apart and taken to model railway shows, where they have won lots of trophies for being brilliant.  Dudley and Waverley climbed up and gave them a polish.

There is always a big show at the Bentley Works in Crewe, so hopefully we can help with that.

We will ask Grizzly to take us along again another day and try to get some more pictures of trains running, and we will let everyone know when we find out the date of the next open day.