Hollowell Show 2016

[International Steam]

Sorry. There are only so many hours in the day and too few hours at a show to do justice to everything present, not to mention finding time to relax and savour the atmosphere. We spent five hours driving the 100 or so miles from home, five hours at the show, that's a long day. I'm a fussy photographer and like to wait for the sun to appear, additionally at a popular show like this, you have to be very patient with people milling round the exhibits, they are the people who pay for the show to take place,

I freely confess as a retired railway enthusiast I have never really got into models or anything less than 12 inches to the foot scale. It's a personal preference, as a 'steam' enthusiast I have a broad range of interests as you will see from my site. My favourite scene by far is 'real' steam in any form, a machine doing the job it was built for.

I spent some 30 years travelling the world for working steam locomotives and then 10 more years travelling in Asia for stationary steam engines. Unfortunately, real road steam has been very thin all through that period, I recall only a couple of Robey steam wagons in Colombo, Sri Lanka and and an American built steam roller in Java, Indonesia, both in the 1970s.

'Steam' is a wonderful hobby, we are part of a very broad church and I totally understand other people's different areas of specialisation. Now if only there were more of today's younger generation with a hobby other than staring at their mobile phone...