I had expected to spend this morning heaving wooden tables, hooking up extension leads, and shouting greetings to friends across a school hall, surrounded by little models of all shapes and sizes. But instead, all the models have come to me, in bright close-up, and I'm awed by quality, detail and craftsmanship that I could easily have missed in the jostle of a busy show.

So my first thought is to offer admiration, as well as thanks, to all the people who have scrambled at such short notice to provide this brief feast for what we thought might be a day of famine.

Well done, every one!

But being of an annoyingly contrary disposition, I want to say something extra, and the story starts 50 years ago at a Horticultural Halls model railway exhibition in London. I was a gazing, jaw dropped, at a half-finished 00 locomotive by the legendary Ross Pochin. Two elderly codgers looked over my shoulder, probably in their forties, and one said to other, "Makes you want to go home and smash everything you've made, doesn't it?"

Reader, there is no need at all to feel like that!

Gauge 1 is broader than these snapshots of fine work: it is also the the smell of steam and rattle of wheels on a summer afternoon, or doggedly coaxing a grate of cinders in grey drizzle, or craft knife and sticky fingers. (Pick your own memories and clichés.)

And Gauge 1 is by no means entirely time-consuming, expensive, elderly, serious. There has always also been room for simple functional models, put together in sheds from household materials. And if I could keep just one engine, it would be a tinplate clockwork toy. There is plenty of Gauge 1 that can be made on a kitchen table, or school workshop, at pocket money prices; lots of scope to adapt motorised toys or Lego components; great satisfaction from a layout put together on a lumpy patio, or an old door. And technology changes the rules: one of our Traders here taught his son to draw and print a scale model locomotive ~ at the age of nine! More on all that another time.

As it's now time to open the show, I'll leave you with this magical image from the last time G1MRA met together, looking forward to many more magical times ahead: