It was nice to be asked back to the Exeter Garden Railway Show in 2013 - they'd shown great faith in booking the layout when it wasn't even built, so it was nice to be able to come back with it looking a lot less bare!
It seems to be a tradition that Flagg Fluorspar attracts "visitors" of various kinds when at Exeter: these can be members of the various Garden Railway Forums that I inhabit, or trains, or "other items" like this, which had mysteriously arrived by the time I came in to start running on the Saturday morning................
...................... and which equally mysteriously disappeared at the end of the Show! Having said that, it did go quite well, so one might well become a permanent feature - all I need to do is to find an appropriate figure and devise a means of opening the door remotely..........
Another, slightly more familiar visitor, was John Rogers Hector the Hedgehog, visiting from Brizzle. He DID stress that this was a BIT of a come-down, seeing as how his last appearance had been on the footplate of Nunney Castle...............
........... but he seemed to enjoy watching the trains go by.
The latest creation from Swift Sixteen appeared, but had considerable clearance problems so couldn't run. The MDLR Killer Bunny is keeping an eye on things..............
One train (captured here by Harry Cullen) which is INCREDIBLY noisy, is the one of mine hutches - they might be small, but (particularly in a quieter room) they make one HELL of a racket!
One tradition at the end of the day's running is to run the "Beer o'clock" train - tired batteries on all the locos mean that we often end up with a ridiculous number on the front!