We are just back from a flying visit to Birmingham, it was to visit Model World, as Jono is a fan of model railways. I’ll tell you more about the rest of the trip in another blog post, but this is just to cover the exhibition.
It was on both Saturday and Sunday, we bought tickets for Saturday, we stayed very near the NEC, so I took a walk over on Saturday at 9.30am when it opened and the queue was huge, it went all the way down the corridor and around the corner. So, we decided to wait until later when hopefully the queue had gone, which it had at around 11am.
It was a great event, there was a lot to see, including model railways, remote control cars, tanks, monster trucks, planes, a large Lego layout, Airfix, Scalextric and more. There was also a section for the kids to make a Woodland scenic diorama, and to play with the Hornby play trains.
The place was packed, and it was very hard to see some of the bigger layouts, especially as Jono was in a wheelchair, and the barriers blocked the view too. It was also quite hard to get to some of the stalls – there wasn’t room to get the wheelchair in there. We enjoyed looking at the smaller layouts though, and we enjoyed what we saw. Maybe the organisers might think about an hour or two for people in wheelchairs, so they could get to see everything, or a discounted ticket. There were a lot of people in wheelchairs, and I’m sure they would have had the same issues. I know there’s a free ticket for carers, but as we don’t live in the UK, we didn’t have the documentation they were looking for, so we both paid for our tickets.
We bought our lunch in the transformed London Transport Routemaster RML, Jono had fish and chips, and I had a chip butty. There were other places serving food too, including a pasty stall, coffee dock, and more. There wasn’t much seating though, so many people had to sit on the floor, again something else that might be addressed.
Those are my only negatives. We really enjoyed our visit, we saw Jenny Kirk, and she smiled at us, and I was delighted to meet model railway enthusiast and music producer Pete Waterman (Kylie, Rick Astley, etc.) Find out more about Pete’s railway here. Ignore the fangirl face on me!
One of the highlights for us was ModelU, it’s a 3D scanner so you can get a figure of yourself for your model railway. It only takes a couple of minutes to be scanned and then you can choose the size of figure that you want and choose to have it painted or printed in colour. The company posts the model to you when it’s ready.
I didn’t take many photos, but I’ve added a couple to this post. You can read more about the event here.
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