Leeds Model Railway Society annual exhibition 2025

It's all aboard as we meet some of the model railway enthusiasts at the Leeds Model Railway Society's 2025 exhibition.

Transcript

00:00I'm John Aldrich, I'm the Exhibition Manager for the Leeds Model Railway Show, which is

00:05run by the Leeds Model Railway Club, and we're here at the Grammar School at Leeds for our

00:10annual exhibition. We have a great collection of model railways here, some large, some small,

00:17various different gauges, O gauge, quite large, down to two millimetre scale, which is quite

00:22small. Model railways is a great hobby to have, it introduces you to all sorts of skills,

00:28electrical wiring and carpentry if you're going to build your own baseboards, modelling

00:34scenery, all sorts of different activities. I got started back in 2003, I lost my father,

00:42and I was doing the paperwork and everything for my mum, I took it all home, and I said to my wife,

00:48just bring me a magazine home for the weekend to take my mind off things. She brought me a railway

00:54modeler. That was it. It started from then, eventually got into exhibiting.

01:00I'm the 60-year-old apprentice. I started with locos, as most hobbies do, when I was about six.

01:09My grandad was an electrician, he liked to buy his wife an electrical item every month, so sometimes you

01:16got the new toaster, etc., and come back with a mallard. Eight-foot piece of four-foot board, oval track,

01:24and then off you go. I think railways always provide a lot of attraction to people. Some of

01:30that rubs off on us more than others, and it sort of still goes down the generations, so children are

01:36still interested. Perhaps not quite as much as it might have been when I was young. Within the hobby,

01:42there's always talk about moderellis dying out. It hasn't yet, and seems to still be going quite

01:48well, and there are lots of new manufacturers starting to make moderelli equipment, so I don't

01:55think it's dying yet. A lot of enthusiasm still. One of the things I get asked a lot of, well,

01:59I've told a lot of times, is I've got a load of stuff at home, but I haven't done anything with it,

02:04and the thing is, have a go. You can do it. It's not difficult. You know, if you make a mess of the first

02:10one, have another go. Yeah. That's one thing I've always found. And the other thing, as far as

02:17spending money's concerned, it doesn't have to be expensive. You don't have to buy brand new,

02:23find a friend who's got the same interest, come on a 60-year-old apprentice, and off you go.

02:29Moderellis is a hobby. It's something that I've done for a long period of time, but having a job that

02:37involved quite a lot of sort of sitting at a desk sometimes with a laptop and having to think

02:42about that, work with a laptop. Going home of an evening sometimes and sort of relaxing, doing

02:48something more manual with my hands and sort of that sort of activity was a great relaxation from

02:54my work. And I think that was sort of one of the advantages of, to me, of having a hobby.