Stacks of sleepers and logs in the Redbridge works yard, with a steam locomotive shunting behind

Yellow engineers' crane and Network SouthEast locomotives at the Lockton Lane depot

Chairman’s Chatter: October 2023

Published 1 October 2023

Dave has worked hard to help Margaret Roberts with the disposal of Geoff’s railway models, thank you.

The AGM is before us, and I expect much discussion about new premises. There may be a need to change our constitution to push matters forward. Your “Clubroom sub-committee” is working hard to find a suitable solution but please keep looking yourselves. We have less than 12 weeks left at Manor Farm.

00 Gauge Matters

Redbridge experienced a somewhat frustrating show at New Milton, where we suffered a rather major failure of the route setting system during Saturday morning, the cause of which is still unknown and being thoroughly investigated. Luckily, we were still able to run some trains and change routes within the fiddle yard to some degree, allowing us to put on a show. As we head towards Tolworth in November, we hope to have this issue diagnosed and fixed.

Mike has worked on fixing the crane and gantry, other than this Redbridge has seen a quiet period as focus turns to tidying and packing up the clubroom ready for the move.

EM Gauge Matters

Mawgan Porth is now in store offsite.

0 Gauge Matters

Abbotstone has been packed down ready to be moved . All dexion is dismantled from room 1. We now concentrate on dismantling Itchen Bottom and recovering everything we can.

Hopefully the new premise will allow Abbotstone to be erected as before. Until then the plan is to move to an offsite store whilst we have a van hired for Redbridge Wharf.

Other Business

The next few months are sad ones in that packing up after 35 years will result in breaking up a lot of hard work and skills applied by many members, some of whom are no longer with us. At the time of writing, we are still expecting a two-stage move, one to store all that we need to and still have access to for exhibition commitments, and the second, to find and make good (if necessary) any new clubroom.

All this will need a lot of work and lifting etc., and I am sure we shall achieve this with planned co-ordination and team effort.

Any new venue will inevitably raise our running costs and as you are all aware this have a knock on effect on subscriptions. This has been discussed generally and our AGM will clarify where we have known facts to discuss.

Whatever our position on 1st January, we will plan meetings which may include slide shows, talks and modelling topics like show and telll. This has happened before when we needed to keep clear because of ‘foot and mouth’ (remember that !)