The organisers had given us an even better slot than last year, this time placing us out of the direct sunlight from the window above the side entrance and giving us the whole of that side to use. Unfortunately we only had two projectors so one screen sat dormant for the weekend - perhaps in the weeks to come we can look to picking up a third projector so this doesn't happen in future.

One amusing aspect of this exhibition was the 'OO' guage modern image layout next to us, the operator of it, Tony, is a Virgin Trains driver and spent the majority of the weekend actually on our stand operating MSTS rather than his own layout. Picking up the slack on the layout, Connex and ThinLizzy spent the majority of the weekend operating it (and I even had a play myself for a little while :) ). Tony said he had a great time on MSTS and would definitely be looking to get hold of it for his own PC so we have another convert there :)

Martin Ford joined us again for his second exhibition, this time wearing his new UKTrainSim T-Shirt! :)

MartinH demonstrated the Cambrian route again, and Saddletank decided to spend the weekend working on some more of Highworth. There was a bit of a fright on Sunday morning after some excellent progress made on Saturday - when it seemed he'd lost the days work and would have to go back to Friday - however I believe after some fiddling around he was able to rescue a good chunk of it, and then he spent more of the day driving so he could relax a little :)

I had my new 'Shuttle' PC with me - it is a very small PC built in to a tiny little case, it comes with a carry bag so it can be easily moved around. It is very quiet and keeps itself extremely well cooled despite only having one fan (plus one for the PSU). It's an impressive piece of kit and I highly recommend it for anyone looking at a new system.

One very nice surprise from Saddletank and Ian Morgan was a 1st birthday cake to celebrate the first anniversary of UKTrainSim exhibitions - thanks for the thought guys, much appreciated!

Sunday saw the "Southern Boyz" all turn out in force along with some of their own 'OO' guage rolling stock to put on the layout next to us, while Tony continued enjoying his time on Microsoft Train Simulator.

It always happens once or twice and this time Saddletank had the pleasure of speaking to someone that was absolutely and totally convinced that what we were doing was absolutely not modelling railways, if it didn't involve plastics, glue and so forth. Martin tried to convince him for a little while that what we were doing was just as much modelling as the plastic and glue stuff is but in the end they agreed to disagree and left it at that. I think it's sad that someone can so completely miss the point, but not everyone is going to grasp it and it's just something we have to accept.

There was a good turn-out of UKTS users to the exhibition as usual, including basildd and weathergirl, Ken Austin, Dave Babb, Gary Cox, Jon Champ and Richard Scott.

Sadly the end of the exhibition wasn't quite as good as we'd hoped. Ian Morgan (the organiser for this year and last - and known as ianm42 on UKTrainSim) let us know that due to his own work pressures he had declined to organise next years exhibition but would try to find out what the new organisers thoughts were on inviting us along for 2004. Later on Ian spoke to us and told us that apparently a number of exhibitions had complained to the organisers that we were making too much noise and they were getting headaches, as a result the general feeling was that we would not be invited back for 2004. I was a bit taken back by this as we have always said that if anyone wants things turned down (or even off) then we are happy to do that - and we'd been making an effort to keep volumes down anyway. The fact that nobody had mentioned anything to us, and even at the end it took Ian going to ask them before anyone said anything about it doesn't sit too well with me, I appreciate people being honest and straight with me to allow us to fix the problem, rather than just not saying anything and refusing to invite us next year.

To be honest, once you went past our stand down to the rest of the exhibition the sound wasn't carrying particularly well anyway!

Still, it's up to them and it just means we have one more weekend free to go somewhere else next year!

Over all though the exhibition was up to its usual standard, very well run and a pleasure to take part in. Sincere Thanks to the organisers and to all those who came to give their support, as always, very much appreciated.