What's On
The Great Little Train Show Is Back This Weekend
Thousands of people turn up for the Southland Society of Model Engineers Inc ‘Great Little Train Show,’ every Labour weekend.
It’s been going for 41 years but the club has been around much longer - since 1937.
President Greg Fordyce said they have members in their teens right through to their 80s and 90s and the club hopes to be around for a few more years yet.
Exhibitor Owen Davies (92) has been coming to the show for many years “bringing his old clockwork Hornby metal from the 1920s,” and has a real attachment to those era of trains, Greg said.
This year for the first time is a group of Mecano enthusiasts from Christchurch to put on a display, and the Central Otago Model Society will be sharing some of their train layouts as well.
Greg said there will be about 36 layouts this weekend - the most they’ve had in quite some time, and three club members will be displaying their new ones for the first time as well.
It’s a huge task for the committee getting the clubrooms and badminton halls at Surrey Park in Invercargill set up for the weekend.
It takes about six hours to pick up all the layouts from around the city (two are in Bluff), and another six hours to set them all up, and then they have to pack them up again at the end of the weekend.
The club’s major fundraiser for the year attracts up to 5000 people across two days, which includes trains, boats and RC buggies - but most families come for the ride on outdoor train.
There’s diesels and steam engines and all of the indoor train layouts that will keep all ages entertained.
Greg first got involved in model trains at 13 when he discovered his father’s train layout in the garage collecting dust.
He convinced him to set it back up again, and when his mother came home from work as a nurse with Plaster of Paris, Greg would use the material to build up the background scenery.
But it wasn’t until he was in his late 20s with his own garage, that he decided to fully embrace the hobby, and back he went to his father’s garage, and found the original layout up in the rafters.
A lot of the train tracks had rusted but he was able to salvage enough of the rail circuit and started to give the layout a bit of a spruce up.
It was then that he joined the model engineers club and finally took along his old display - now modified in ‘army style’ - and it’s still there to this day.
But he’s since built about another nine or 10 layouts over the years, and is hoping that the club will continue to attract more of the next generation coming through.
“We try and have a real variety on the day. We get a lot of people coming along who say they remember growing up with parents or grandparents that had train layouts. Everyone has a story.”
The Great Little Train Show is on Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm.