About Us
GLR Bespoke Services was formed in 2016 by me (Steven) after returning from a 6 month deployment with the RAF Reserves to Akrotiri. Having worked in a model shop for a number of years, I found I was getting asked to do more and more side work by customers. This included layout wiring, loco servicing and more. As I had leave stored up, I decided to give it a go and formed GLR Bespoke Services Ltd. GLR standing for Gileston Light Railway, which is the name of my ride on railway at home.
Within a year I had a solid base of customers and we were attending shows regularly too. This presented a problem, in that there was more work than I could handle, even with my parents help! Martin joined the company and brought a wealth of tehnical knowledge and took on a lot of the repairs and upgrades of locos.
We moved to our new premises in Barry as the home workshop was not big enough and also setup a shop for people to come too.
Things were going great and I employed one of my customers sons (Tom) to do website work along with other duties
In 2019 I and 5 others took part in the Great Model Railway Challenge coming 2nd overall (whilst having good time!) on the Mc Alpine Estate. Following this we moved our final layout, Miniature Minatur Wunderland to the shop as an exhibit and then took it to Warley kindly hosted by Bachmann Euope. Things could not have been better!
Of course at the start of 2020 the pandemic hit and we had to close our doors to visitors, it was a worying time. But amazingly we were busier than ever, with work posted to us and several larger projects in that allows us to continue to funtion (the Welsh Gov Covid Grants helped too!). It was also at this time we took on my now Sister in Law to run our social media and web orders.
Coming out of Covid we resumed our shows, home visits and the shop re opened to visitors too. All seemed to be going well until our landlords decided to increase our rent renewal by nearly 50%! This was clearly insane, so we moved out of our workshop and shop of 3 years and decided to operate from our hme workshop for the summer of 2022. Then we had a lucky break when our longtime garage mechanic offered us a space in his recently purchased farmland out buildings in St Athan. In the cowshed! After a first look, and seeing the potential we spent time making the building suitable to occupy and moved in just before Christmas 2022. We have plans to stay here and are now making it winter proof, increasing the shop stock with Peco, Gaugemaster, Signatrak and more.
In 2023 we also partnered with Signatrak to advertise and distribute all the DCC products of the range.
