France in Focus

Christ, that is real professional stuff, beyond my ambitions. I am in awe!

Thank you. We had the good luck to be brought up in modelling life to produce to exhibition standard. This through our club back in the UK. But let me say there are plenty of layouts around built to much higher standards than we have achieved.

Wow, in awe!

I second that wow. Have you ever exhibited in the Gard? I wonder if I might have seen it.

Iam on these two Uk based forums some of them do model continental layouts. " RM web" forum & "model railway forum.co.uk" if it had been Uk stock I would have been interested, if it doesn't sell give me a PM, Iam about to start a large layout 7Mt X 4.5Mt, so my plans are flexible.

As far as I'm aware everything apart from the Jouef is UK stock ( although there's a chance there may be some Canadian or German pieces as well, as I said I haven't gone through all of the crates ). OH was a great fan of the GWR so I would expect most of the locos come from that era. Its all OO guage and,as well as the rolling stock I've track & boxes full of tiny bits of electronics I wouldn't have the foggiest idea what to do with. Most of it is just waiting for a trip to the dump.
For context the original layout was dismantled in 1992 and never re-assembled. There's a chance that some of the unboxed pieces go back to the 50's.

@exile oh thank you, you've taken me back 60 year!. My cousin Lew who was 26 yrs older than me (yes 26) and whom I referred to as Uncle Lew had a fabulous model railway collection. One very large bedroom housed his hand built structure & collection. He altered the door into the bedroom so that it opened outwards and we had to crawl in underneath the structure to the middle where everything operated from. For me who was around 7 yrs at the time I found it fascinating which is possibly why I became a train spotter as we lived near our station. When they moved house it was sited into a large shed in the garden. Uncle Lew died in 1980 I know his son still lives in this house but I don't know whether he still has the collection. He must have liked farm animals as well as he started my collection bringing models on every visit - maybe I was going to get a farmyard built in my bedroom!

Another possibility once the collection is in UK, maybe a specialist auction house?

And it would be handy to hear of someone travelling back to UK with an empty van.

If you know anyone with a subscription to a UK model railway mag then there maybe some useful contacts listed?

Sparkle wrote: ↑Fri May 06, 2022 12:17 pm If you know anyone with a subscription to a UK model railway mag then there maybe some useful contacts listed?

I think that might be me @Sparkle - original reply to @Antonia applies.

As to auctions, there are a few places that have regular model railway/toy auctions.
Special Auction Services have an annual Trains Galore auction but this tends to be collectable = expensive items. In between times they have 2 or 3 actions of less valuable items.
Vectis - vectis.co.uk - have monthly auctions of model railway items more of the sort that Antonia describes.

The problem with auctions is that they apply a buyers' premium of 15-20%, so the buyer pays that amount on top of the hammer price. This has a habit of depressing the sales price, On top, a sellers' premium is also applied which means that while the hammer price might be £100, the seller receives perhaps £90.