It’s all aboard as we visit the Leeds Model Railway Society at their biggest event of the year.
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00:00I'm John Aldrich. I'm the Exhibition Manager for Leeds Model Railway Society.
00:05I was always interested in model railways, and I did model railways when I was a youngster as well.
00:12But I really didn't get back into model railways until almost I'd finished my time at university,
00:18and I was thinking, there must be other things I can do with my time other than studying.
00:23It was my wife, actually, who persuaded me to go along to a model railway club in Leeds.
00:28Everybody in the club is obviously interested in model railways, but they all have their own interests,
00:34and it's finding out what those interests are, and also getting to know people as people, individuals.
00:41I've been doing model railways for about ten years now,
00:46and it started with my wife announcing she was pregnant with our first son, and I thought, time to get a hobby.
00:55I always had a fascination about miniatures and making models.
00:59The models I made happily lived on a shelf for a few years, and then the cat came and knocked them all off.
01:04All these models I've been making over the years didn't do anything.
01:09They were static, whereas the models on the model railway all formed part of this collection.
01:15When you look at these layouts, they're huge, and the time spent on them is vast.
01:21But if you break it down into each individual component, it's very manageable, and it's really enjoyable.
01:28I enjoy building models, and so that's something that I like to do.
01:34The job that I had, quite a lot of it ended up being on a computer, and in a sense being quite academic at times.
01:43So going home and having something that I could do with my hands and relax after a day was something that sort of helped me wind down a little bit.
01:53And then of course during COVID, when we had nothing to do, building model railways is a fantastic way to use your time.
02:01When you speak to people at shows and they come up to you, the conversation always starts off with,
02:06I'd love to do something like this, but it's too expensive.
02:09What does get expensive is when you buy bits of this and bits of that and bits of that.
02:14Have a clear focus and then have a clear plan what you'd like to do, and then buy accordingly to that.
02:21Model railways aren't expensive, but they are if you buy the wrong things at the wrong time.
02:30Keeping the club going always presents its problems at times, because what we really need is a big space where you can put model railway layouts.
02:37Ideally at a very low cost, and finding premises like that that we can rent is difficult at times.
02:45And we have gone through a few periods when we've lost our club rooms, and trying to keep a club alive during those times is difficult at times.
02:54But we carry on and try to encourage people still to take an interest in the hobby.