The Club builds and operates layouts in a variety of scales.
First stop – Stevenage
Over the Christmas period we’ve been doing some unglamorous logistics work – tidying up the electrics and rearranging the transport boxes to make travelling to and from shows easier – ready for our 2017 outings, the first of which is at the CMRA’s first show at Stevenage Arts and Leisure Centre on 14th and 15th …read more.
Jan 7, 2017
Highlights from Warley
So we’re back from Warley. Setting up was restricted to four hours because of a delay getting into the hall – we need five, to include getting stock on. Needless to say, our running on Saturday morning was a bit of a trial. However the big success was seeing the major works at the south end …read more.
Nov 28, 2016
Goods and Mineral Junction Box
I thought you might like to see the last bit of work on the centrepiece of Belle Isle, before we crated the layout to go to Warley. Making blocks of buildings is a useful way of checking shape / space requirements. There is no question that Goods & Mineral Jcn. box will need a fully …read more.
Nov 23, 2016
Professionalism Maintained
The layout running settled in very nicely at the Club’s Open Day on 20th November. Gary has devised a very elegant shuttle mechanism for the underground and Richard’s buildings made major progress as he demonstrated today. The main buildings and roads have been given a more convincing colour wash at the south end (which belies …read more.
Nov 20, 2016
Work “Ramps Up”on Goods Yard
Quite a lot of recent progress in the King’s Cross yard. The ramp to the Cally Goods & Coal Yard is now blocked out and in red oxide primer. It is red brick anyway, but will need detail cladding in our home made brick plastic. In the short-term it will be weathered in its current …read more.
Nov 14, 2016
Putnam – November update
Putnam will not be running during the Club’s Open Day on November 20th. The lower hall will be given over to the Club’s wonderful Copenhagen Fields layout, which is a good reason in itself to come along on Sunday. Several members of the Putnam group will be present on the day, helping out in various …read more.
Nov 13, 2016
Sticking point
There are six points on Minories, all operated with Tortoise slow action point motors with Exactoscale baseplates transferring the movement of the motor through a tie-bar under the baseboard to wires soldered to the underside of the switch rails. There are stretcher bars between the switch rails, and although these do provide some mechanical joints between the two switch …read more.
Nov 7, 2016
Putnam – October update
Following Putnam’s last showing at the London Festival of Railway Modelling in March, work has commenced on expanding the side of the layout away from public view. The storage sidings, now shared with the clubs a-building modern image OO gauge layout Ingatestone, are being increased from 8 to 13 lines. The Club’s carpentry whizz has …read more.
Oct 19, 2016
What, more rolling stock?
One may wonder why a layout of this vintage still needs new rolling stock. When the main Happisburgh layout was sold to MRC and GOG member Martin Long, most of the stock was passenger vehicles. A lot of what freight stock we had was returned to its original owners and what we had left was …read more.
Oct 11, 2016
Autumn in Happisburgh
We’ve had Alan West’s BTH Class 15 diesel running on Happisburgh Goods for some time. It was constructed from a kit many years ago, but it never looked or ran very well. However, after extensive rebuilding of the mechanism and bogies by the late Peter Elmslie, it at least ran well, and with some very …read more.
Oct 11, 2016
Converting Heljan Class 23 to EM
The Heljan Class 23 is one of the simpler conversions to EM gauge. I don’t think there are any revolutionary ideas here, but hope this may be of use to anyone else contemplating the conversion or looking for an easy one to start with. The model as supplied picks up electricity from the …read more.
Sep 24, 2016
Ingatestone’s September running day
Last Thursday Ingatestone had a demo / running night so we all brought some stock in to run on the two big end boards. Chris had his class 90 – a work in progress upgrade from the Hornby original whilst James had the old “One Anglia” livery version ‘out of the box’ so we could …read more.
Sep 24, 2016