Building Incredible City Scenes Plus The Best Layouts of 2023

Morning Gang!

Happy New Year! Seems a bit late saying that now but as this is the first newsletter of 2024, it's got to be done! Here's to a good year… Let's face every challenge with determination, passion & enthusiasm… For a couple of weeks at least :)

And being 2024, it's actually quite a significant year for SMS as we're celebrating our 10th anniversary this year! Ten whole years of making small stuff by setting light to it with lasers. It's bonkers. And what a wild ride it's been. Anyway… as it's our 10th year, we'll be organising a few special things throughout the year… both online and down at our Truro HQ, so stay tuned for dates and announcements as the year progresses.

Hope you all had a decent Christmas. We spent quite a bit of it up in the Midlands visiting family, then came back home for New Year and my birthday. Both the journey up and back were actually quite pleasant to be honest, despite the travel news on Radio 2 saying it was going to be chaos… hardly any traffic on the way up and not too much coming back either. Although various train companies managed to make Elizabeth's journey on Christmas Eve a complete pain the posterior, terminating her train at Sheffield. So we had to drive up and pick her up. Then her journey down to home on Wednesday this week took around 10 hours instead of 5 due to countless cancelled trains because of the rain. But she made it here in the end. Tired but otherwise intact.

So we've been spending a bit of time with Elizabeth, for a couple of days, mostly listening to her rehearsing Dance 10 Looks 3 from Chorus Line which she's doing for an assessment in a couple of weeks. Then we're taking her back to Liverpool today. In fact we'll probably be back on our way up the M5 as you're reading this as she starts back at Uni on Monday. We're also now on the usual New Year health-kick… cutting out the excessive sweet stuff… no more mince pies & Christmas cake for a while. The biscuits are nearly all gone and we're back throwing the kettlebells about 3 or 4 times a week after work.

Work wise, it's been a week of catching up on orders from over the Christmas period. We're about there I think with just a handful outstanding due to a couple of stock issues with suppliers. So next week we can finally get back to doing what we're good at with a bit of luck. Still a shed load to get done behind the scenes too though, with showroom enhancements, dioramas to build, more systems to finish putting into place so we can be more disciplined with our operation. Some are just little operational tweaks, but if we can 100% nail those, the bigger obstacles will be easier to tackle. It's all down to discipline really, like a lot of things in life. We know how things need to be done… it's giving the why more emphasis so that the what and the how become second nature. Resulting in things running smoother operationally at least.

I've not managed to finish my stickers for the laser room shelving yet actually so I'd better get back on those. Then it'll be obvious where specific materials need to go and how our packaging materials should be loaded onto the shelves when we've had a delivery.

Product Development - Latest News

Not a lot of work has been done this week on new products, although I've been researching a nice, rather versatile industrial building that we found while up in Leicestershire. I'm hoping to start work on it next week should time allow! I'm hoping to get time to sit with Sam and review his prototypes for his new modular walls too.

Talking of Sam… here's the videos he's picked for you this week…

Building A 19th Century Mansion…

Hi everyone, Sam here. Hope you all had a fantastic Christmas and New Years. Bring on 2024! The first video I've selected is from DIY Garage. In this video, he constructs a simple 19th century style manor with a few modern touches. These videos are incredibly satisfying and like nothing else I've seen before, constructing each individual brick with mortar. I'm aware most of you won't be building your layouts in this away but either way this is an incredible video and I would recommend checking out their channel.

Top Model Railway Layouts Of 2023

The next video I've selected comes from a club favourite Model Railway Quest. Her channel has been gaining a lot of traction recently and rightly so, gaining 1k subscribers in the last month. The list she has put together is fantastic and covers a range of different layouts. I trust her opinion so this is a great video if you want to see some highlighted layouts from the year.

Building An Incredible Cityscape

For the third video, I wanted to include a more in-depth, longer video incase any of you want to kill some time. You guys know by now that I'm a massive fan of city dioramas (specifically Japanese) so here is another one. Coming from the channel Cityscape Studio in partner with KATO, modeller MAJIRI creates dioramas of cityscapes. There's some great techniques in this video and a lot of LEDs.

The History Of Lego Trains

Anddddd for the final video I wanted to include something that's a bit of fun. Larry's Lego is a great channel which shows mainly his custom Lego trains. I've wanted to include a Lego video since I started doing this section of the newsletter so when I saw his channel combining model trains and Lego I knew I had to feature it. This video goes over the history of Lego's trains which I didn't even realise they made! If you want to see some more of his work, I would highly recommend his channels. That's it for me this week, hope you guys are having a great weekend.

What else?

The 2024 First Class members layout plaques will be released in the next couple of weeks so you'll be able to pop your orders in for those if you're a First Class Member of the Railway Modellers Club. We've also got a few other bits of merchandise to get set up on the website for those that have been asking, which I'll try and get done next week.

Stu's just started compiling content for the next issue of the First Class Newsletter so hopefully that will all come together over the next couple of weeks as well as working on a couple of new how to guides.

I'd really like to start the live builds again on a Wednesday morning, but we'll have to see how things pan out over the coming weeks really. Loads of other things to get stuck into also. But that's for next week and beyond.

Have an amazing weekend folks… and of course…

Keep on shunting…

Justin, Tina, Elizabeth, Lola & The Team

P.S. This weekend's header image features another railway crossing scene that I spotted on Facebook earlier in the week by Marco. It's a work in progress but it's coming on really nicely indeed. And just like Matthew's scene in the previous newsletter, he's made great use of our LX484-OO NYMR Crossing Gates.

P.P.S. Missed a newsletter? You can read all of our recent newsletters online here.