11/12 September 2010, Nationale Smalspoormuseum Modelbouwdagen, Valkenburgse Meer near Leiden, Netherlands

After a gap of 5 years since I last attended Valkenburg, a very late opportunity to fill a vacant seat in Lee Bryant's car arose and at 0300 on Friday 10 September I duly left home on a memorable expedition to the Netherlands that finished 72 hours and 10 minutes later when I returned to my bed at 0310 the following Monday!

It was great to meet up again with many of my good friends in the Dutch 009 Group on their own “home turf”, as well as several other fellow narrow gauge modellers from both Holland and Germany, plus of course the British contingent of Lee Bryant with Coil End Lane; Tom Dauben and Chris Matthews with Tom’s Dunbracken; Don and Val Sibley with their 1:100 scale (almost TTn3!) Belgian Country Tramway; and Andrew Burnham and Heather Scott from Peco who joined us on the Saturday.

I very much enjoyed all aspects of the weekend, which anyone who has ever attended will confirm, is so much more than simply taking part in a model railway exhibition. I was particularly impressed by and grateful for the superb welcome and hospitality provided throughout the weekend by the hosts from the Valkenburg Museum. Fantastic! An added bonus was Ted and Henriette Polet’s very kind invitation to Lee, Tom, Chris and myself to visit their home for an evening meal, and of course to climb that famous near-vertical staircase to see the Craigcorrie & Dunalistair in all its glory (Minus Dunalistair Harbour, but we caught up with that at the museum as Ted had extracted it for the exhibition). It was my own 4^th ascent of the stairs to visit  the C&DR , but a first for the others and a highlight of what was a superb, friendly and inspiring weekend for us all.

My set of photos starts with some impressions of the visit to the C&DR – which in my opinion is easily the premier model of a complete operating railway system, narrow gauge or otherwise that exists; then we travel across the city of Leiden from Ted’s home to the Valkenburg Museum and I have tried to compress a reasonably comprehensive overall summary of all the attractions to be seen, both model and full sized. A brief glimpse of the superb BBQ and special train that the organisers laid on for participants on the Saturday night, and finishing with some photos of the attending layouts – with no apologies made for featuring Dunalistair as the main attraction (complete with some of my own visiting Mull & Iona Railway stock!). I do hope you enjoy this report, which for me was the highlight of 2010.

Click Here to see the Photo Album for this Report