Made in Miniature
DAVE YOUNG
An estimated 900 enthusiastic visitors attended Hastings’ first model railway exhibition for five years. Held at Hastings Academy, the show presented both 0 and N gauge miniatures referencing everything from a Sussex village, Swiss Alps and steampunk. Pride of place went to an impressively detailed Staffordshire pottery diorama, with smoking kilns and a canal in addition to trains. Built by Gillian Peters, in 2017 it won a Stuttgart exhibition award, beating 200 others. The smallest exhibits were travelling layouts, tiny enough to fit inside a little alloy suitcase.
This was a family day out, where tiny trains, houses, cars and people inhabited intricate idealisations of remembered and imagined worlds, and traditional craft skills combined with new tech computerised controls of signals and points.
Organiser Dawn Quest arranges shows around the country and intends to return to Hastings next year with more community involvement and a possible link with Men in Sheds. Her love of model railways began when asked to paint figures on a friend’s train set: “Before I knew it, I was hooked – it wasn’t long before I was painting and creating scenery and designing layouts.”
Dawn is a former journalist, writer and TV producer, including BBC1’s flagship Breakfast programme. “It felt like a natural progression to combine my journalistic and TV skills with my hobby and create the Model Railway Quest series on YouTube, featuring interviews with model railway builders, shows and tutorials,” she says. Dawn’s own efforts have a movie theme and include The Ladykillers and Brief Encounter, the latter in monochrome, as is the film.
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