Today Mrs Woody and myself found ourselves in the Lincolnshire village of Ruskington where the Sleaford Model Railway Club were holding their Model Makers Show. Mow the last time that we went to any type of model show was back in January 2020 so it was both with some trepidation and keenness we entered the venue at the village hall. It certainly was not the biggest show we have ever been to but it had that local feel with a wide variety of items on show from matchstick creations, military and aircraft modelling, farm and showground equipment as well as model railways. I think the highlight of the show was the raffle. The club obviously had someone with good persuasive power as it took about 30 minutes to draw all the prizes and there were some great prizes. Two Graham Farish train sets, two family tickets to Newark Air Museum, a lot of model railway accessories, gift vouchers galour and more bottles of wines and tins of chocolates and biscuits than the local CoOp probably had in stock!
There were some great exhibits and the first one in my line of vision was this 0 gauge model depicting part of RAF Shoreham specifically on the 3rd September 1943. The gent who built it was ex RAF and had known my dad which was extraordinary in itself but the model also is unusual. He started the model at the commencement of the first lockdown and this is now its second showing. If I recall this correctly a B19 bomber had crash landed in the channel. The RAF rescue services located the crew who had survived and three Supermarine Walrus air sea rescue craft which were amphibious landed on the sea to rescue the downed crew. The capacity of the Walrus meant that each could rescue three airmen. Two Walrus took three downed crew and the third Walrus took the remaining four. That fourth crew meant that the Walrus could not take off and despite the issues of being in the English Channel with the possibility of enemy fire the pilot of the Walrus taxied the plane back towards the English coast. Eventually a RAF Rescue launch found them and took the crew and rescued crew on board and towed the by now fuel-less Walrus back to RAF Shoreham. There are all sorts of cameos and details on the models including figures of the builders father and father in law. A great model and a piece of history recorded and retold in model for - wonderful!
Having learnt all about the air sea rescue I then learnt something about tiger tanks that I never knew. A modeler had a 1/72 scale tiger on a German railway wagon. The Tiger is the new Airfix kit and the wagon from a small manufacturer. The bit that I learnt about was that because of the sheer size of the Tiger it was too wide for the loading gauge of most European railways. If it had travelled without some form of modification it would have smashed into platforms, signals and other trains. That bit took Mrs W's interest as she would secretly like to see my model trains have some form of catastrophic accident! The modification to the Tigers was that the outer set of wheels were removed and the tracks swapped for narrower ones. Very time consuming no doubt and not what you need to quickly move armour about in a war situation.
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