Went Warley yesterday and had an enjoyable day......but same old problem stood looking at some layouts for five minutes and nothing moved. Some one made a very apt remark of one layout as he walked away "must be a static display". Some really excellent layouts, there was a Scottish 7mm modern image (well almost) not a period that I have any real interest in but seeing this I could be tempted! really nice stock including dmu's and a voyager. I could have watched it all day, did anyone take any photos?
I wanted to be impressed with Aberggeegg!, superb models but nothing moved for over 15mins, the crew more intent on sharing some internal joke focused on mimicking some person in a funny voice, not impressed to be honest. Don't get me wrong, humour is great and a little banter here and there is fine, so long as its short lived and there's trains to watch, clearly they were having fun, sadly none of the paying punters were, I and several others walked away in despair.
I'm sure it runs to a prototypical timetable but in fairness if I wanted to sit line side and watch no trains for hours I'd do it outside in the fresh air and not constantly be banging elbows with people, a superb layout spoilt by no or little movement.
The other underwhelming one was the gauge 3 branch terminus, again excellent modelling but little movement, for goodness sake just make something up!, however the biggest spoiler was the locos, actually loco, only ever saw one move!, excellent models and looked like they were track fed and the slow speed was so jerky I thought it more akin to Hornby from the 80s, given the recent thread on battery power, here clearly was a very visible exercise in how not to power large locos, very disappointed in seeing such large well detailed locos perform worse than much smaller stock.
Conversely the oo-9 cliff layout nearly always had something running and being single track with a passing loop station clearly wasn't running to a prototypical time table and as such kept a lot of people glued to the stand for some considerable time.
The other impressive layout was Liverpool Lime Street, but again some operational issues, you couldn't get close enough as the operators were sat in front of large panels at the front of the layout. Being 4mm you were a good ten 6-10' away which makes 4mm look a tad small, I admire the panels, all fully automated and track routed and very impressive to watch as was the remote controlled traverser/ selector plate, but I wanted to see the layout. It was so far away with people in front and a very narrow viewing area (high layout with lower top fascia) I was left feeling like I was looking at something through a letter box.
A fundamental problem with Lime Street is that most if not all is in a cutting, they did leave the side wall off the approach tracks which was very impressive but included the sloped walls from the station throat down to the end stops so one only really either saw the station roof for 1/3rd or the station buffers and concourse for the other 1/3rd, scenically excellent beyond words but for punters to watch, very restricted.
I'll stop there before I offend any one else LOL, but these were my impressions and I'm sure differ from a great many others, once I'd been around a few times I started to look at which layouts had/ held the biggest crowds and that was as insightful as anything I achieved yesterday. Anything roundy roundy always had good crowds, large depot layouts with stuff always moving were popular too, the larger 7mm depot layout was always rammed, I over heard a couple of guys say they would come back later when it had died down, to which another turned and said. you'll be lucky, I've been here 10mins trying to get a look in.
Kindest
Non dcc the JLTRT is about 800 notes
........you would have to add the cost of some nice gearboxes into the RTR JLTRT one too for a fair comparision with Heljan 
..............Lima managed to do it right on their oo gauge Western in about 1976
