Recent News of the Society
It was a lovely sunny and warm afternoon for the club’s Midsummer BBQ and track meeting a few days later, with 10 steam and 3 battery locomotives seen on the main track. Running continued until 8 p.m. and approx 50 members had earlier enjoyed a BBQ of burgers and hot dogs.
The Society played host to around 15 Beavers, leaders, family and friends from the New Romney Group on Tuesday 23rd June. It was a warm and sunny evening for the visit and the youngsters, and also the leaders and parents, had numerous train rides on the track. They also went into the garden railway to look at the smaller trains and some of them even tried to count the goldfish in the pond.
David Mills ran his ‘G’ scale stock in the garden railway and Andy Nash, David Trelfer, Paul Norrington and Brian Remnant ran their locos and gave numerous rides to the visitors.
The following week, fifteen students, two tutors and a bus driver from the East Kent College at Dover, visited the club. The visit was arranged by club member, Kevin Piggott, after a similar visit from Thanet students to the Canterbury club had been successful. They spent a couple of hours at Rolfe Lane and watched a demonstration of 3D printing and CAD by Paul Sutton. Brian Remnant demonstrated and discussed the pressure testing of vessels and Andy Jones showed them the workings of the track cleaning wagon. They also had numerous rides on the track and had a chance to drive a loco as well.
A successful run for the New Romney Country Fayre at the end of July with lots of visitors. Around 25 members helped in various ways throughout the day and a total of 13 locos were run giving rides, six live steam and seven battery. The garden railway was in operation as well and thanks to the ladies for the refreshments in the clubhouse
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Track meetings were held every Tuesday during the hot sunny weather of August and September with good attendances and many locos on all the tracks. At the beginning of August, Andrew Crayford entered ‘Minx’, the club loco, in the IMLEC competition which this year was held at the Sheppey MES track and finished a credible 10th. Danny Hayward with his rebuilt ‘Merchant navy’ finished 12th and Andy Nash with his BR Standard Class 2 finished 14th. Over 30 Pizzas were consumed for the Pizza evening the following week. In September, Andrew Crayford, Paul Norrington and Andy Nash took the ‘Minx’ to the Reading MES track for the LBSC Rose Bowl Rally.
At a committee meeting at the end of July, it was decided to rebuild part of the garden railway, as some of the supporting timber was rotting away. It was decided to take up the ‘O’ gauge track on the top boards as it was no longer used and also to remove the DCC from the bottom 45mm track which would only be used for battery power and live-steam in the future. The bottom section of the railway was to be rebuilt first and the 32mm and 45mm tracks were numbered and taken up and stored. The only power to remain to the railway would be analogue DC to the top 45mm ‘G’ scale track and all the other transformers etc. in the signal box were disconnected.
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