Our focus today was on Open Wagons and after setting the circuit up John P quickly had his Prairie running round with some of his wagons and a brake van. Fred then followed, first with a BR single unit DMU and then with his Terrier pulling several of his collection of local private owner wagons. Later I ran my SECR H Class pulling several different SECR open wagons and loads and in between all this Rob and others ran various things including I thought a train of vans rather pre-empting the focus for the next meeting.
Kenneth Harrison and his daughter Rachel visited us during the morning. Kenneth who is interested in North American railways is in the process of moving to Kent and came along to see who we were and what we were up to and hopefully we will see them again soon. Still later Steve ran his ex LMS 8F 2-8-0 No. 48146 and Graham ran his LNER J71 0-6-0T No. 68306 with a long train of open wagons.
On the big table Peter carried on with his line side hut and Tim was painting a platform from his brewery layout. Geoff had brought in two ex SECR locos; an L1 Class 4-4-0 and a P Class 0-6-0 No. 31556 both in BR black. The P Class must be one of the most modelled locomotives in relation to the numbers actually built as there were only ever eight of them and the world and his wife seems to have a model of one.
Over lunch I read out the usual notices and reminded people about the forthcoming modelling competition. Tim, inspired by Geoff’s talk on the subject at the weekend, proposed that we include an extra category this year for dioramas, cameo layouts, micro layout or planks as you prefer.
David Ho suggested that as the Lenham project is now being revived we have an extra meeting day dedicated to working on this layout and allowing us the space not available on a normal meeting day. It was agreed that this would be helpful, and a suitable day will be arranged shortly.
With twenty people attending today David Ho was more than usually busy providing us all with teas and coffees which he did in his usual inimitable fashion. Chris
