Our focus on the circuit today was on tank wagons. Fred started proceedings running a mixture of six and four wheel tank wagons pulled along by a very nicely weathered Jinty. This was followed by John D with six Basset Lowke tank wagons also pulled by a Jinty but this time in Irish National Railway livery. David Ho ran his BR Standard 3 2-6-2T with ten milk tank wagons and Roger had some unusual looking Ermefer bogie tank wagons, unusual in that the tank is not horizontal but is raised at one end. Later on, Graham ran a long train of twelve tank wagons and four open wagons pulled along by his ex-LNER Class K3 number 6168.
Queen Charlotte Dock was set up and given a final running session ahead of its outing at Bexhill MRC’s exhibition this coming weekend. With both top and bottom sections’ running this layout needs a minimum of three operators and more properly four to keep all the plates spinning with of course one more to get the teas in. Over lunch we discussed insurance for our celebration of 200 years of railways at our meeting on 25 October. Geoff has spoken to our insurers who will require an additional premium of £346 to cover us for this event. Given the large numbers of locomotives, we hope to display and their value it was strongly felt by the meeting that it would be extremely foolhardy not to have adequate cover in place and Geoff was asked to make the necessary arrangements.
After last year’s disappointing meal at the Red Lion, we will hold our Christmas lunch this year at The Gunpowder Mill just off the London Road in Faversham. This will necessitate moving the Christmas Quiz to the previous meeting but will relieve the general air of anticipation and excitement by having it a bit earlier. Having dug out his papers it was confirmed by Ross that the inaugural meeting of our august organisation was held on 8 February 1986. That being so our celebration of the Fortieth Anniversary of EKOGG will therefore take place in February of next year. As always teas and coffees were provided by David Ho, and once everything was put away and Queen Charlotte Dock loaded up into cars for taking to Bexhill, we headed off home. Chris
