15/16 FEBRUARY 2020 MILTON KEYNES

The model railway exhibition at Milton Keynes went very smoothly and whilst knowing what works and doesn't work we were able to run a service with hardly any derailments or crashes. On the top level, we had made sure that we were ideally using 2 or 3 car trains so that it reduced the likelihood of the cars derailing on the joints of the baseboards. The most notable runner, in fact probably one of my favourites was the Class 483 in NSE livery. It ran like a treat and it had no faults whatsoever. If I was allowed to, I would probably buy all the NSE ones and just run them up and down as they were so good, so smooth, faultless! On the bottom level however, we had quite a severe issue with the size of the tunnels on the B board. This prevented us from running trains from one end to the other - so for a quick fix that still saw the occasional train we just shuttled back and forth between B - C - D. Now thinking back to it, I believe one of the tracks weren't perfectly lining up with C and C+ and this had caused derailing every time a train went over it. We had also brought our UK Departure Board and we were able to set it to a London Underground station and show that to the audience as well. In terms of the reliability, the third and fourth rails were correctly positioned this time and thus allowing us to run trains over it. The electronics proved very good with only a couple of train detectors and points failing. We also had CCTV cameras fitted into the fiddle yards and this made it much easier for the operators to be able to know when to stop the train. We did have a slight issue with the sector plate in the D board for the top level where it had to be 1mm exactly in order for it to power that particular track section. This sort of didn't really work as half the time we couldn't power the trains because it thought it wasn't lined up whereas in reality it had. Overall, we survived and we were able to run a moderate service whilst showing what Abbey Park looked like and that it could run once these issues were fixed. What happened after the show is certainly something that would change the life and existence of Abbey Park.