THE theatre building had caught fire, and the fire had taken hold. Firefighters and fire engines are on the street below, and two huge fire ladders have been pressed into action. Smoke belches from the building, and, deep within it, the flickering remains of the fire are visible.

Nearby, however, life continues as normal. Guests pull up outside the Bayview Hotel in horse-drawn carriages, not a care in the world, while trains make their way to wherever it is they are headed. At a caravan park on the edge of the bay, the blades of wind turbines churn through the air.

This is the Cadham Bay model rail lay-out, devised and built over three years by members of the Glenrothes Model Railway Club. And it was one of the many attractions at the Scottish Model Rail Show at the weekend.

The fictional Cadham Bay, 38 feet in length, drew a constant crowd of spectators, arrayed along its length behind a crowd barrier. Model-rail enthusiasts were able to appreciate the finer details, such as the gauge of the model trains, and the expertise that had gone into creating the buildings and the scenery. Others were riveted by the unfortunate theatre.

“The actual building is a conversion of an off-the-shelf kit,” club member Stephen Taylor explains later. “That gives us the building structure. The smoke itself is from a smoke-filled fogging unit, which is meant for use in model boats. I saw it at another exhibition, where somebody was using it to blow smoke out of an industrial chimney, and I thought I could use it for a fire situation.”

It certainly is an attention-grabbing lay-out. “What we try to do as a club is try to make it an entertaining layout for the public, to give people something to look at,” Taylor adds. Cadham Bay “was a combination of every member of the club - everybody puts their own ideas into it. The harbour area, for example, was based on Arbroath harbour - Arbroath is where the guy used to go on his holidays.”

The Glenrothes club was formed in November 1963 by five local railwaymen for the sons of railway workers. Cadham Bay is its biggest-ever layout, and it has won a few awards over the years.

Model Rail Scotland is the biggest model-rail show in Scotland. It used to take place at the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street but its home for the last 30 years has been the SEC. It is staged by the Association of Model Railway Societies in Scotland (AMRSS), which has 30 member societies. The show is expected to have attracted some 15,000 people over the three days. Of the rail layouts, 14 were on their first outing to Scotland - and, of these, two had never been viewed by the public before.

Everywhere you looked there were things for sale: model trains in a complexity of different gauges (‘00’, the one favoured for Cadham Bay and many other layouts, is the most popular). A Model Rail Scotland limited-edition model of a ScotRail class 47Waverley train was released on the Friday; Juliet Donnachie, station manager at Waverley, opened the event that day, with Clyde 1’s Grant Thomson entertaining the crowd with music to mark the 30 years the show has been here.

Every manner of accessory was on sale, too, such as tools and paint. You could buy a water-based paint that gives a rusty, weathered effect to tracks. Hand-decorated resin buildings were in plentiful supply - 30s-style bungalows and church buildings. Tiny figures of the kind that dot the layouts were available: six 1950s’s seated figures (£5.20 - but £13.75 if painted). A set of 10 wild birds; 12 assorted doves and pigeons; an assortment of beer, cider and soft-drinks crates. It’s hard not to be struck by the ingenuity of it all, to marvel at the work that goes into creating these miniature worlds, with trains of every vintage speeding along rails against remarkably detailed backdrops.But it’s clear that technology has made inroads here, too: many layouts these days are controlled by DCC - Digital Command Control, which essentially means that you can control your model trains from your tablet or smartphone.

Glasgow South Model Tram & Rail Group staged its Trams of Yesteryear layout, which has been seen at numerous exhibitions across Scotland these 30 years.Helensburgh & District Model Railway Club has a riveting layout set in the Western Front in 1915, with period trains ferrying vital supplies through a blasted landscape of ruined buildings and rubble.

Bridgewater, a 00 gauge layout, is the work of the Bishopton Model Railway Club. It’s huge. It has numerous trains, a road network with DCC-operated, moving buses and cars, houses and other buildings. There’s a harbour, and a railway bridge, and lots of miniature people too, It’s an impressive piece of work.

Is it based on Bishopton? Duncan Kerr, the club secretary, shakes his head. “It’s totally out of one’s imagination”, he says. The harbour might reminds some people of parts of Fife. “A little bit of inspiration has come from that kind of area, in terms of the stonework and the housing style and so on. All the houses are scratch-built, but most of them were inspired the Fife coast, the harbours and so on around there . The big one over there is actually based on Ingliston House, which is on the outskirts of Bishopton.”

How long did it take to reassemble it at the SEC prior to the show opening? “If everything works - bearing in mind that when you transport things, the vibrations and so on can knock things off - it probably took us about two hours to put it up,” Kerr says.

It seems that the only limit when it comes to designing and building model-train layouts is your imagination. “That’s exactly right. With any modeller the only limit is your imagination, unless you’ve built a model on a specific area or a specific station or town or whatever. But, as I said, we don’t do that, because you’ll always get somebody who comes up and says, ‘I know this place very well, and that shouldn’t be there’, and I feel like punching them then,” he says with a quick laugh. “The hours of work that have gone into it, and there’s one wee thing, and somebody comes up and says, ‘That’s not right’. So it’s been our policy for as long as I’ve been in the club, and that’s a long while, to build layouts that are fictitious.”

Kerr began designing Bridgewater in 2014, and it took the club members about two years to create. “None of us in the club are what you might call purists but we built layouts for the general public,” he adds. “People, families come here, and they want to see things that have many bits of interest in them, like the moving vehicles and the trains. But a lot of work has gone into the scenic side of it, building the scenery up and creating that scene that runs along the front of the layout - that’s where your imagination really can go wild. A lot of it is down to money as well, of course.”

Colin Rae, a member of the Falkirk Model Railway Group, is publicity manager for the association. He and his AMRSS colleagues are happy with the weekend’s turnout. “You’re never, ever going to please everybody, of course, but the reaction has been very good,” he told The Herald yesterday. “Lots of people on the rail-modelling forums have been saying that it was absolutely brilliant.” Last year’s attendance was 14,000 and it’s expected that this year’s will be closer to 15,000.

I mention that I was struck by the sheer attention to detail in many layouts, Cadham Bay and Bridgewater among them. “It’s very interesting that you’ve picked those two in particular,” he says. “What you’ll find is that general public, and Scottish model-train enthusiasts in general,like what we would term a train-set. Even the cracking Falkirk ‘Carron Grove’ layout at the show [which was designed by the late club member David Lind, who died in 2010 after a long illness] is typically a train set. By which we mean it’s totally fictitious. The club will think of the elements it wants to include - there’s a station, a depot, there’s maybe a builder’s yard, a canal. And they basically squeeze all that in.

“Bishopton is a classic example of that: they’ve squeezed in tons of stuff, like docks, stations, and roadways for the buses. They’ve included elements of every bit of reality into a very small space, and they keep things moving. It’s like a massive play-set. They run the buses and the trains, and the public love that, because there’s always something happening, something moving. But what the serious modeller will do is depict a diorama of a specific area and will model it to the nth degree of scale and detail. It’s maybe just one or two tracks and a lot of scenic elements, but it means there’s a lot less movement, and sometimes members of the public will say that they didn’t see a lot of movement for a few minutes, and they will move on. Kids in particular tend to have a short attention span.

“So Cadham Bay and Bridgewater are both very busy and very popular, even if they are just general train-sets. But what emerges from layouts like them is that people would look at them, take them in, and think, ‘Yeah, I could maybe see myself doing that’, because it’s not designed down to the nth level of detail. It’s true that the only limit in model-rail is your imagination. It really is a great form of escapism.”