I really want to form a society...

[Phil Parker]

4 minutes ago, The Red Admiral said:

That's possible but I don't think it would negate the need for dbs would it?

i think I would be happier if we all had our dbs checks.

in fact it makes sense to me if everybody that can carry one does as a matter of course.

 

i once worked with sombody for two years in nhs that turned out to have convictions that should have blocked his employment. I was totally shocked when I found out.

 

It works for the Model Railway Club, they run a very successful junior section.

 

DBS checks cost money, if you require everyone to have one, I can't see that being popular.

[The Red Admiral]

10 minutes ago, stephennicholson said:

 

We  have gone down the route of requiring a parent/guardian to attend with the child rather than dbs checks. We have nearly 20 junior members so that works as well as pulling in adult involvement. We do have our premises so that does give an advantage.

 

Oh so it covers you all, i stand corrected.

 

you could also make all members responsible for providing their own check, just thinking outside the box.

i don't know how well that might work.

[The Red Admiral]

5 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

It works for the Model Railway Club, they run a very successful junior section.

 

DBS checks cost money, if you require everyone to have one, I can't see that being popular.

that's a fair point, but £10 each or so may be easier to find than the club having to fork £250 annually.

 

we need to be welcoming as well as safe.

 

and if it increases catchment...

[AY Mod]

Stop and think before any of this peripheral stuff -  just why do you want to create a society?

[Phil Parker]

9 minutes ago, The Red Admiral said:

that's a fair point, but £10 each or so may be easier to find than the club having to fork £250 annually.

 

£18 each - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/fee-reduction-for-dbs-checks

 

The bigger point is that if the club can't find £250 each year, then it's never going to be able to rent anywhere big enough to meet. Look at railway arches and other commercial space in your area

to get a feel for the price. And no, you can't meet in your rented house, unless your lease allows for it.

 

TBH, if there is a club close to you, join it and make your life easier. OK, so you might need a taxi, or even a bicycle (it's how my dad and I visited the L&WMRS for years) if you don't drive, to get there in the evenings, but it's a whole lot less difficult to arrange than starting from scratch. Don't wait for the show - join now!

[pete_mcfarlane]

19 hours ago, The Red Admiral said:

As a trainer I have my own dbs but wouldn't have thought about others.

 

 

I think you need to be DBS checked for each organisation you are involved with. At the very least ask to see people's form, rather than relying on verbal statements that people have been checked through work.

 

The other challenge is that DBS checks are only point in time confirmations that people are OK, so you need to redo them every few years. 

 

24 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

 

It works for the Model Railway Club, they run a very successful junior section.

 

DBS checks cost money, if you require everyone to have one, I can't see that being popular.

I don't think you need to check everyone, you just need to make sure that somebody DBS checked is always present with the junior members. So have some 'Junior group coordinators', get them checked, and make sure that one of them always turns up. 

[The Red Admiral]

48 minutes ago, AY Mod said:

Stop and think before any of this peripheral stuff -  just why do you want to create a society?

well, i live in small towns - generally and don't really like travelling into the big cities if I can avoid it.

and really just wanted it all to be within walking distance, with a small band, equal voices and the social part is most important.

living alone, by choice, during lockdowns, i went a week at a time without seeing anybody whatsoever regularly.

i found it hard to socialise afterwards.

yes, I need people that know and understand more than me, advice and help and to share the hobby.

 

not least, i'm not confident of my woodworking skills and tools, despite training apprentice engineers for a living.

 

and I want to be able to build and run layouts that require more than one operator.

[The Red Admiral]

All in all, I think my best chance is to join the nearest, hopefully Neepsend and get my skills and confidence up.

[The Red Admiral]

Off topic.

 

Does anyone know why I can't see images on this site?

 

i can't see any pictures or galleries, they're just black...

 

[AY Mod]

25 minutes ago, The Red Admiral said:

well, i live in small towns - generally and don't really like travelling into the big cities if I can avoid it.

and really just wanted it all to be within walking distance, with a small band, equal voices and the social part is most important.

 

These are not sound reasons for forming a club; they appear to revolve around what your specific circumstances are.

 

26 minutes ago, The Red Admiral said:

yes, I need people that know and understand more than me, advice and help and to share the hobby.

 

For that an existing club is the best resource, not starting from scratch to find some people who happen to live closer to you than an existing club.

 

27 minutes ago, The Red Admiral said:

I want to be able to build and run layouts that require more than one operator.

 

But you don't have the space; again an existing club will be better for you but you will have to go along with what they're doing rather than wanting them to do what you want.

 

28 minutes ago, The Red Admiral said:

i'm not confident of my woodworking skills and tools

 

You don't necessarily need a model railway club for that; look to night classes and other groups.

 

I hope you find a club that you'll be interested in; it really is the best way forward rather than trying to recruit people because of things and skills you don't have or have access to. See if you'll fit in rather than seeing they'll do what you want.

[AY Mod]

1 minute ago, The Red Admiral said:

Off topic.

 

Does anyone know why I can't see images on this site?

 

i can't see any pictures or galleries, they're just black...

 

 

As covered in numerous topics we had a server drive failure 12 months ago which lost a lot of images.

[The Red Admiral]

1 minute ago, AY Mod said:

 

These are not sound reasons for forming a club; they appear to revolve around what your specific circumstances are.

 

 

For that an existing club is the best resource, not starting from scratch to find some people who happen to live closer to you than an existing club.

 

 

But you don't have the space; again an existing club will be better for you but you will have to go along with what they're doing rather than wanting them to do what you want.

 

 

You don't necessarily need a model railway club for that; look to night classes and other groups.

 

I hope you find a club that you'll be interested in; it really is the best way forward rather than trying to recruit people because of things and skills you don't have or have access to. See if you'll fit in rather than seeing they'll do what you want.

I'm not looking for control or leadership, just that I would rather find similar on my doorstep.

 

i've come to a decision though and the way is to try an existing club.

[Phil Parker]

Another thought - if transport is the issue, car sharing is often an option.  Once you get to know people, you may find some living near you happy to have company for the trip.

[wagonbasher]

31 minutes ago, The Red Admiral said:

well, i live in small towns - generally and don't really like travelling into the big cities if I can avoid it.

and really just wanted it all to be within walking distance, with a small band, equal voices and the social part is most important.

living alone, by choice, during lockdowns, i went a week at a time without seeing anybody whatsoever regularly.

i found it hard to socialise afterwards.

yes, I need people that know and understand more than me, advice and help and to share the hobby.

 

not least, i'm not confident of my woodworking skills and tools, despite training apprentice engineers for a living.

 

and I want to be able to build and run layouts that require more than one operator.

 

Andy's words are hard and to the point (as is his way) but far more important than stuff like DBS checks given the status of your enterprise..  

 

Number 1.   You have already joined the best model railway club there is RMweb.  You are only on post 20.  Yes, the forums can't teach you wood working 'skills' on here but they can show you how they did it and if necessary direct you to a company that will makes base boards for you.   There is so much collective knowledge on this forum, more than you will ever need.   

 

Post on here and you will genuinely get help and advise, possibly, probably  more than you want and contradictory at times, the suggestions were just flowing in when you reached out today.  Regular contributors can become friends especially if you have things in common and keep popping up on the same threads, you may even meet them at shows in person, maybe they are short of a layout operator for that show? 

 

I personally think you are right joining a club given your objectives but even then a club doesn't have to mean the classic, clubroom, committee, junior section ect.  It can be you going around Bills shed every Sunday morning or every Monday at yours around the kitchen table with a wagon kit each.   

 

I wish you well in your endeavours

 

By the way, if you want to make friends, sign your name (not every one will agree with that)

 

Mine is Andy

 

Andy

 

 

[The Red Admiral]

Thanks Andy, I'm Chris.

 

[009 micro modeller]

17 hours ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

I think you need to be DBS checked for each organisation you are involved with.

Basically yes, although if you are someone who needs a similar kind of DBS across multiple settings you can register it with the update service to avoid having to go through the whole process each time.

 

On 16/04/2023 at 14:17, pete_mcfarlane said:

So think carefully about junior members - if you want them, you'll need to have safeguarding policies and DBS check people

In my experience I think the issue with this for some clubs is working out who exactly needs to have a check (just committee members etc., or literally everyone? Or something in between?). When I was a junior member of a model railway group myself we generally did the ‘accompanying adult’ option. Within the last 3-4 years I’ve done some volunteering myself (not railway-related but relevant to this point) where we needed to be DBS-checked to go into schools, although in most cases the after-school activities we did wouldn’t generally have been classed as ‘regulated activity’ (i.e. working unsupervised with children and/or over a certain number of hours per week - there’s a government document online somewhere with a bit more detail on this).

 

 I also did a museum CPD course very recently where we discussed this and the point was made there (in the context of managing volunteers/freelancers) that really you shouldn’t necessarily just do a full enhanced DBS check on absolutely everyone on the off-chance that they might subsequently need one, you need to be able to show that they actually need it for the work/volunteering they do (I think this relates to the data privacy side of things).

 

In a model railway club where junior members are not required to be supervised by a parent, especially one with a less formal management/committee structure, I can see this potentially getting a bit complicated. Slightly separate from this, in an amateur sport group I am involved in (which generally is very welcoming to junior members and families) there are some insurance restrictions on juniors taking part in certain types of event.

 

But agree with previous posters, safeguarding/DBS etc. is important but perhaps not the main thing at this early stage.

 

On 16/04/2023 at 12:51, Michael Hodgson said:

Club rooms are often the biggest practical problem, especially where to keep club  layouts. 

 

On 16/04/2023 at 21:33, Dungrange said:

I had a gentleman enquire about membership at the last exhibition that we attended, but he was only interested in O gauge.  If that was all we did, then he's have signed up, but he wasn't really interested in helping out with any layout that didn't meet his interests - such people are of little value to us.

Depending on the type of club envisaged you may not actually need a club room as such. In the 009 Society we have multiple area groups that each cover a large area and have monthly meetings in members’ homes or in village halls (with those who are able to taking it in turns to host). This generally means there are no club layouts, though this isn’t always the case (in the past there have definitely been at least a couple of 009 Society area groups with quite extensive club layouts). The group I’m a member of is now doing a modular project - so everyone does their own thing up to a point and looks after their layout, but the modules can also be linked together and operated as a group. And getting involved in the modular scheme is not compulsory (for instance, I’m not currently taking part but may still have a go in future).

 

We have now grown to the point where most of the meetings need to be in village halls as there are too many people for home-based meetings, so there’s a cost for that (paid for by collecting a small amount at each meeting from those who attend, rather than a flat yearly subscription), although it’s still much less than actually renting a club room. During Covid we also started having some Zoom meetings, which we’ve continued alongside a return to in-person meetings. And we still do all/most of the other things (sharing skills, meeting up at model railway shows, visiting heritage railways as a group, and sometimes organising displays and exhibitions) that a more conventional club might do.

[Steven B]

The 2mm Scale Association and N Gauge Society both have area group networks, so this may be another thing worth looking at (not sure if the 4mm and 7mm based society's have something similar).

 

Rather than setting up a full club, perhaps a notice in the local newsagent, supermarket or parish newsletter might help the OP find some modellers more local to him than the nearest existing clubs.

 

Steven B.

[Michael Hodgson]

22 hours ago, The Red Admiral said:

That's possible but I don't think it would negate the need for dbs would it?

i think I would be happier if we all had our dbs checks.

in fact it makes sense to me if everybody that can carry one does as a matter of course.

 

i once worked with sombody for two years in nhs that turned out to have convictions that should have blocked his employment. I was totally shocked when I found out.

There is some mistrust over the DBS system, I believe they hold records of unsubstantiated allegations which may well have been made maliciously in personal disputes.  I did hear that one of the perservation groups (I forget which) had lost some volunteers over DBS, in that some existing working members (not necessarily perverts with a record they want to hide, but who kows?) refused to consent to such checks seeing it as a personal insult.  The checks are arguably desirable for those in public facing roles like Guards and platform staff, but is it relevant if they are merely scraping down rusty boilers?  In any case, what would unaccompanied children be doing there - shouldn't the parents be keeing an eye on their kids if they are visiting a preserved line?  The other adult passengers aren't checked and they could be as big a danger to such children.

 

I had to have a check before I was allowed to host an (adult) refugee from Ukraine, even though there's no children involved.

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, Michael Hodgson said:

I had to have a check before I was allowed to host an (adult) refugee from Ukraine, even though there's no children involved.

That’ll be the ‘vulnerable adult’ DBS check, which is slightly different. Personally I think there’s a good argument for leaders of groups to have both types of DBS check, especially as the definition of ‘vulnerable adults’ can be quite wide and may include some of a group’s members anyway. But that’s leaders of a group, which is very different to all the group’s members. In terms of data privacy it’s almost never going to be appropriate to make getting checked a condition of joining a model railway group.

 

1 hour ago, Michael Hodgson said:

There is some mistrust over the DBS system, I believe they hold records of unsubstantiated allegations which may well have been made maliciously in personal disputes.  I did hear that one of the perservation groups (I forget which) had lost some volunteers over DBS, in that some existing working members (not necessarily perverts with a record they want to hide, but who kows?) refused to consent to such checks seeing it as a personal insult.  The checks are arguably desirable for those in public facing roles like Guards and platform staff, but is it relevant if they are merely scraping down rusty boilers?

I agree about public-facing roles but even then a basic DBS check might be appropriate, rather than a full enhanced one. For instance, in my previous job I did not have to have an DBS even though I sometimes led family craft/learning workshops, because parents were always present as well.

 

 In the case you describe, it’s perhaps going a bit far to see it as a personal insult but they are right in the sense that there’s no particular reason for them to have to have a check (unless they were, for instance, in charge of supervising others, including juniors, or training/inducting new members). I was told on the CPD course that I did that that (iirc) they don’t hold information on active investigations; somebody mentioned that they’d once been put in a slightly awkward position because the DBS check for the volunteer they were taking on was officially clean, but the chief constable (I think) for their area had felt obliged to inform them of an active case involving the volunteer in question, which suggested that the volunteer was a safeguarding risk.

 

I think the DBS system as currently set up it’s often going to create problems where there’s an unclear distinction between service users or ordinary members of a membership organisation on one hand, and people running or leading an activity on the other. Another example from the course was a museum that had done a youth theatre activity, where some of the participants were under 16 and some over, and had to decide whether to check the older ones (I can’t remember off the top of my head what they decided, or what is technically correct).

 

Which is all getting slightly off topic but leads us back to:

 

2 hours ago, Steven B said:

Rather than setting up a full club, perhaps a notice in the local newsagent, supermarket or parish newsletter might help the OP find some modellers more local to him than the nearest existing clubs.

This is how a lot of 009 area groups started, even if many of them are now more formally constituted (as might be necessary if you did anything that involves spending or making large amounts of money, like running an exhibition). And often the larger and more formal the group, the more likely it is to need proper policies on things like safeguarding and insurance.

[RJS1977]

The alternative route to go down is the "circle" concept. There is no club layout as such, or club premises (and usually no membership fee), but the members take turns to visit each others' layouts and help each other out. One member may be good with electrics but terrible at woodwork, another is good at woodwork but doesn't know one end of a soldering iron from the other, so one builds baseboards for the other's layout in return for the other wiring up his layout. A development of this is a modular layout group where each member builds their own module (which may be a viable layout in its own right) then every now and then get together in a garage or hire a church hall to put it all together.

 

The extreme though is the "Circle" I'm in where one member has over 75 layouts stored in his shed (!). Twice a year they hold an exhibition in a church hall where he puts some of his layouts up the day before and the other members bring their own stock (or their own "guest layouts")  and operate them! (As the exhibition raises money for the church, there are no hall fees so very little financial outlay). 

[Liam]

On 17/04/2023 at 12:54, stephennicholson said:

 

We  have gone down the route of requiring a parent/guardian to attend with the child rather than dbs checks. We have nearly 20 junior members so that works as well as pulling in adult involvement. We do have our premises so that does give an advantage.

 

Yes, for us in Redditch MRC we have a unit in an industrial warehouse, and it is strictly no under 16s allowed - that’s the rule of the premises which every tenant must follow.

 

 

[Liam]

On 17/04/2023 at 15:27, Phil Parker said:

Another thought - if transport is the issue, car sharing is often an option.  Once you get to know people, you may find some living near you happy to have company for the trip.

Yes, I’ve car shared a few times on my way home from my second club in Barnstaple (who slightly confusingly meet in Bideford). At the time this happened I was yet to pass my driving test, and realistically I could have waited an extra 20 minutes or so for the bus back to Barnstaple, but that’s the nature of model railway clubs; if a clubmate is able to help you, they will.

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, RJS1977 said:

The alternative route to go down is the "circle" concept. There is no club layout as such, or club premises (and usually no membership fee), but the members take turns to visit each others' layouts and help each other out. One member may be good with electrics but terrible at woodwork, another is good at woodwork but doesn't know one end of a soldering iron from the other, so one builds baseboards for the other's layout in return for the other wiring up his layout. A development of this is a modular layout group where each member builds their own module (which may be a viable layout in its own right) then every now and then get together in a garage or hire a church hall to put it all together.

 

The extreme though is the "Circle" I'm in where one member has over 75 layouts stored in his shed (!). Twice a year they hold an exhibition in a church hall where he puts some of his layouts up the day before and the other members bring their own stock (or their own "guest layouts")  and operate them! (As the exhibition raises money for the church, there are no hall fees so very little financial outlay). 

This (in your first paragraph) is roughly how a lot of 009 and narrow gauge groups work, as I described. Slightly differently, there have also been at least a few ‘clubs’ that have basically been formed specifically to operate a particular layout and keep it going.

 

I’m intrigued by the second paragraph. How big are the layouts? Perhaps more to the point, how big is the shed?! 😀

[009 micro modeller]

34 minutes ago, Liam said:

Yes, for us in Redditch MRC we have a unit in an industrial warehouse, and it is strictly no under 16s allowed - that’s the rule of the premises which every tenant must follow.

 

 

Although that’s presumably more of an insurance issue than a safeguarding issue?

[Liam]

2 hours ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Although that’s presumably more of an insurance issue than a safeguarding issue?

It is, but it also addresses the safeguarding issue.