3-4 March 2012, Strabane at the Romsey Model Railway Exhibition

On Sunday 4^th March I had a “2 hour window” in the morning so decided to visit the Romsey Model Railway Exhibition, organised by the local railway modellers society. This is a fairly small show, normally about a dozen layouts, of a variety of scales and types and always good quality. This year there were 3 narrow gauge layouts: Feltwell Road in 009 from Stuart Reeve and sons, John Thorne with his 009 Purbeck and Andy Cundick with his 00n3 work in progress: Strabane. I have photographed Purbeck and Feltwell Road several times before so as time was tight, I concentrated on Strabane, as it is a while since I last saw the layout and the work has progressed a great deal since then. So this short report is entirely for County Donegal Railways fans! More of Andy’s superb Irish models are in the Donegal and Bradford-on-Avon reports from 2009.

One of Andy Cundick’s information notices at the front of the layout states that Strabane is “the fourth in my trilogy of County Donegal layouts” – and there is a bit of Irish for you! Previous 00n3 layouts in the “series” were: Donegal Town, Castlefin and Letterkenny. Andy has also exhibited another Irish narrow gauge layout showing the Londonderry & Lough Swilly border station Bridge End, just outside Londonderry on the Swilly line to Buncrana and Burtonport.

Photos of Strabane, showing just how far this ambitious layout has progressed since its first outing can be seen in my reports from: Narrow Gauge South West 2009 and Narrow Gauge South 2010. And there’s more to come! So far Andy has modelled just the northern end of the narrow gauge part of Strabane station, as far as the footbridge, for those that are familiar with the location. He intends to add a further 8ft beyond the bridge, and was also telling me of tentative plans to extend the width of the station boards to show at least part of the Great Northern Railway (Ireland) broad gauge station. Ambitious indeed and I very much look forward to seeing further progress of this project.

Click Here to see the Photo Album for this Report