We arrived to find that part of the stage had been removed and the area thus released now storing the tables and chairs. This appears to be a permanent move and certainly makes the hall feel more spacious.
Once the circuit was set up Rob ran his favourite loco of the day, an Adams Radial Tank.
This trundled round very nicely pulling two coaches, but Roger’s diesel and hopper wagons were less successful. Previously Roger had had an issue with some coal wagons being too heavy but this time the problem was that the hopper wagons were too light and kept jumping the rails so back in the box they went.
Dave B brought along the Flying Scotsmen and another LNER A3 he had acquired and had been working on to improve their performance. The Flying Scotsman ran around the circuit without too much trouble, but his second loco didn’t like the curves at all although apparently it ran perfectly well on the straight. After the scratching of various heads, the consensus of opinion around the big table was that there was insufficient play in the driving wheels to accommodate the curves on our circuit.
Geoff ran his J94 “Foxhunter” and also his Class V8 0-4-0T Stratford Works shunter and had a photo of the prototype in service complete with a raincoat hanging on the back of it.
Paul H had put out and intended to bring a favourite loco to run today but had inexplicably left it at home. Sadly, Paul had to content himself with cutting out vintage GWR adverts to add to the station building he was working on.
Once the boards were set up Fred was able to make a start on painting the dock walls on Queen Charlotte Dock. As he was doing this Bill and Nick carried on working on the dockside surface and following ballasting of the track on the bridge David L made the final adjustments to the alignment of rails with those on the viaduct.
Roger reported on the invitation received for us to attend Pett again this year in July.
Ideally, they would like us to take a sales stand, but the question is whether or not we have enough to sell. Roger is to come back further to us on this but in the meantime if any members have anything they wish to be sold they should talk to Roger.
David Ho reported that he had been following up the idea of getting someone from MERG to come and talk to us. David has told them about our forthcoming Open Day and the event is to be put in their journal and hopefully someone from MERG may attend and we can take things on from there. In between keeping all of us supplied with teas and coffees as usual, he also worked on building two new shelves in the storeroom. Chris
