Mike Bellamy

It is arranged by Magnet in just the same way but there is a 10% discount for CMRA member organisations. Well worth it as the discount on a large exhibition is much more than the annual membership fee. When looking at the list of CMRA members, I'm rather surprised to see that several well-known clubs who organise major exhibitions are not members. .

I hope you don't decide to change the trackplan again . . . . 🤣 .

The Magnet Insurance covers visiting layouts "in transit" (other vans are available) - and so they are covered from the moment they leave home or clubroom to when they return. We have just had our local village hall exhibition and for contents cover of £40,000 plus all the usual liability insurances, the cost was £114. You can go to their website and enter details to see what the cost would be for your particular circumstances and then pay on-line. .

Thanks Paul - glad you enjoyed your visit. You must be fairly local so why not call into the clubrooms and find out more about membership - we meet Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday evenings. As for the team from EVRA, at least 6 of our members are volunteers there and I know at least 3 of the others are former club members - in fact I was asking how the railway was able to operate with so many of its staff and volunteers missing 😀 The club has always supported the railway and in fact we bought the very first shares in the first share issue - I think the chairman/secretary/treasurer or somebody called into the club on the evening before the official launch of the fundraising effort and took our cheque and application form !! .

Rather wet last night setting up but all those expected are in and ready to go with a couple more due this morning. Trade from AtoB Models of Matlock Bath, John Sammans (second-hand), Railway Bookshop, Ecclesbourne Valley Railway (Wirksworth line) and our own club stand. 12 Layouts in N, OO, EM, OO9 & O

Same place in the same room as Chris has been for at least 25 years . . . . . . . . . . .

Exactly the same for my brother who retired early and closed his plumbing business and went lecturing at Boston College. The part time students who were also working were great and very keen to learn from someone who had about 40 years' experience but those who were only there for the money weren't interested in anything he said or did. The final straw was when he arranged for the Facilities Manager from the large NHS Hospital in Boston to come and talk to them about their apprenticeship scheme. As you know, being a maintenance plumber at a place like that would be a job for life but despite all his efforts nobody turned up for the meeting - he was so fed up by then that he quit the lecturing job and went back on the tools. Almost 10 years later he is starting again in education but this time as an on-site apprenticeship assessor going out to visit them in the workplace and to check on progress - a job with no hassle . . . . . .

I needed Google for that one . . . . . . . . 😀 .

I get the same on that topic - it's a known fault and on the 'To Do' list for the tech guys at Warners. .

Reminds me of my time riding the Black Horse at Lloyds Bank - the Head Office Inspectors who visited every branch every 2 to 3 years did a full audit of everything, especially checking the cash and valuable items deposited in the strong room. Everything they checked was initialled in distinctive colours that hadn't been used for several previous inspections, but never the popular colours of black, blue and red - and of course they used fountain pens but we all used biros. Some of the items had so many initials in the ledger covering all the colours of the rainbow, that the customer must have passed away years ago ! .

Better late than never . . . . . . . I seem to have forgotten about adding our exhibition 🙁 Mickleover Model Railway Group Mickleover Community Centre Uttoxeter Road Mickleover Derby DE3 0DA Saturday 1st October 10.00am - 5.00pm Sunday 2nd October 10.00am - 4.00pm Admission Adults £5 Children Free The exhibition will follow our tried and tested format which include the clubroom being open displaying 3 permanently set up layouts and then around 9 more in the Community Centre, along with 3 traders and the always popular club second hand table(s). For the past 50 years or so we have always used this exhibition to showcase the work of our own members, either on club layouts or their own. To provide some variety we have more recently started inviting a guest layout and this year we are pleased to welcome Stafford Railway Circle who will be exhibiting "Freshwater", a 4mm EM gauge layout set on the Isle of Wight in the 1930s. The layout was originally built by the late Fred Shilton, whose family very kindly donated it to the SRC. It is built in 4mm scale to EM gauge (18.2mm) and is based on the actual track layout of Freshwater (Isle Of Wight) as it would have been in around 1930. All the locomotives, rolling stock and track were scratch built to very fine standards. Buildings too were scratch built and were based on photographs of the time. Since acquiring the layout, SRC has reinforced the baseboards to allow safe transport, re-wired the points, built a new control panel, extended the scenic section and added a traverser fiddle yard. The layout is analogue with twin controllers with the points operated by H & M solenoid point motors powered by a CDU. The scenics, backscenes etc have been finished in accordance with known information about Freshwater at the time in which the model is set. Light refreshments will be available from The Old School Tearooms (part of the Community Centre)

Catering at Events Despite what most people think - including many professionals who hire out premises etc, you do not heed any sort of qualification or food hygiene certificate to provide catering at 'one off' community or charity events. The important points in the extract above are "continuity" and "organisation" as these both imply that you are running a catering business in which case you need to register with the local authority and have the necessary certificates etc. The guidance below covers a number of examples where registration and certification are not required. However, anyone providing food to others should follow basic principles and apply common sense. https://www.food.gov.uk/safety-hygiene/providing-food-at-community-and-charity-events https://www.food.gov.uk/sites/default/files/media/document/hall-provision.pdf .

We are still hopeful that Derby College will eventually allow outside events to be held again in the Roundhouse. We did have a Derby Airport but it's now underneath the Toyota factory at Burnaston - junction of A38 and A50. Derby Airways operated from there and eventually became British Midland, then BMI then went bust ! .

No extinguisher used and Fire Brigade arrived too late to prevent it being a total loss. Surprisingly the petrol tank didn't explode but it was leaking fuel presumably from a melted pipe. When we went to the recovery depot to get some tools etc from out of the boot, the car was still on the transporter as they were waiting for the Fire Brigade as the fuel had leaked all over the back of the flat-bed and they didn't want to operate the ramp or winch without some back-up in case it caught alight. I had 7 visits there in the early 2000s during which there were a number of suicide bombings and we were instructed to never go on a bus and to only go out in the evening with a member of local staff who would take us to a restaurant they knew to be safe - several had armed guards on the door. On my first visit I went across the road to a large shopping centre where there was a food court with all the usual McDonalds, KFC etc etc - what was surprising was that every seat in this area was occupied by a teenager in green uniform with a rifle across their back as the centre was next door to the main army training depot in Tel Aviv. .

I tried to avoid that by using a conventional till instead of self-serve to then find that as the cashier was under 18, he had to get an adult to confirm I could by a bottle of beer . . . so I ended up waiting even longer than those at the self-serve tills !! Many years ago my son had a terminal failure with his Ford Escort which caught fire for an unknown reason - he was most upset as he had just filled up with petrol and thought that the value of the fuel was probably worth more than the car. Happily the insurance assessor had other ideas and we were paid out more than we expected as it had originally been my wife's car, had very low milage, a full service history and he said the remaining bodywork showed it had been well looked after . . . .

Quote below from one of the links I posted on the previous page - not quite the same story but that's the problem with history - it's a little bit different each time the story gets repeated 😉 .

Sorry to disagree with you there Neil as I recall a local news report in 2003 when Renown was almost totally destroyed in a fire. Having seen them both together at local shows, I was under the mistaken impression that they were both owned by the Howard Brothers but it seems Repulse has a different owner but still local to Derbyshire. Some info in links below https://heritagemachines.com/uncategorised/renown-notches-up-her-centenary/ https://tractors.fandom.com/wiki/Fowler_no._15653 https://tractors.fandom.com/wiki/Fowler_no._15652 .

All the Gear and no Idea . . . . . . . . When clearing father-in-law's house, SWMBO opened a wardrobe in the spare room to discover 17 carrier bags, each containing a SLR camera plus telephoto lens. OK so he was at one time an enthusiastic amateur photographer, but normally (or so I am led to believe), you settle on your favourite make and then upgrade - but in his case there were cameras from Cannon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, Fuji and others I hadn't heard of. By getting a different make each time he had then "wasted" money on buying another lens as each manufacturer uses a different type of fitting. A friend who had photographic knowledge checked them for us and found some still had undeveloped films in, and those that contained batteries had corroded so much they were almost useless. However the individual lenses may have a small value . . . . . . . .

If you are going to use Kadees, then invest in a height gauge so that you can be sure that every vehicle will have compatible couplings. At one time everyone used the number 5 which is medium length and centre-set - the equivalent in the new design is the 148. there are also Kadees that fit NEM pockets if you are using ready-to-run chassis conversions. There is a lot of information on the EDM Models website - see link below. https://ngtrains.com/shop/brand/kadee/?filter_scale=ho-scale Almost all modern wheels will run on code 75 - quite often they are just the same wheels as found on OO or HO stock. Peco O/16.5 track is code 100 and they have points available. EDM Models (again) have MicroEngineering 16.5mm track in code 83 and code 70 as well as well as 14mm track (O.14) for those who want to model a scale 2ft line. https://ngtrains.com/shop/product-category/track/track-track/ .

It took me about two minutes to open a Lloyds account for the local club - but that was in 1987 when I worked there !! Still Treasurer and so I have had that role for more than half of my life. I started at Grantham in 1972 straight from school, then worked at a couple of branches in Leicester before moving to Derby in 1980 - in those days you didn't really get much choice where you were sent. Took a redundancy package in 1997 after 25 years service. All of the 7 Derby area branches I worked at have closed although one new branch opened in the city centre and one ex TSB branch remains open. .

He did of course apologise and was very helpful in using some sort of industrial strength super glue (called Mitre Bond ?) to stick the rear panel back together so the end of the caravan wasn't flapping about when we were driving. .

SWMBO worked as the administrator for the Duke of Edinburgh Scheme at a local secondary school and was the passenger in a minibus driven by one of the teachers going to meet a group of kids at a checkpoint. Going down a narrow lane in the Peak District, she warned the driver that there was a dyke to the left - "There's one to the right as well" was her response !! In other news we are at home instead of being sat on the bank of the Thames at Chertsey. Last month the Camping and Caravanning Club magazine had a brief article about their site there which had been closed for some time for a major refurbishment and they wanted volunteers to go there for a few days (for free) to "test the facilities" before opening to other members and the public. We applied and were accepted. Travelling south on the M40 Thursday we got as far as junction 9 which was very busy as it's the turn off for the A34 to Oxford, Cotswolds etc. Crawling along at about 5mph and we were rear-ended by white van man causing considerable damage to the back of the caravan and front of his Transit. We were right next to an emergency phone so I rang for assistance and although we were both able to drive off the carriageway over the hard shoulder onto the grass verge, the Highways Agency sent one of their Traffic Officer cars to operate a rolling road block in case there was debris on the road. They checked we were all ok and we were then able to proceed to the next exit, turn around and go home again. White van man only lived a few miles away and so he was also able to drive but with no water in his radiator as was all over lane 1. The Traffic Officer said that since "working from home" was introduced, they had noticed a considerable increase in traffic and that "Thursday is the new Friday". Yesterday was spent dealing with three different insurance companies (caravan, car and his van) and getting quote for caravan repair - looks like it might need to go back to the factory for a rear end rebuild as the shower needs replacing as well as the back panel.

Somebody somewhere linked to Hornby is monitoring RMweb. A couple of months ago, Andy Y provided a link to the company responsible for Hornby's website - I spotted a couple of typos in the text on their website and commented on RMweb. Two days later the errors had been corrected. .

UKModelShops website also lists "Rocket Railways" in Coalville - it appears they were previously based in Grantham - but even so, only two shops in all of Leicestershire . . . . . . .

As you are now a member, have a look at the publications pages as they have three volumes of "Small Layouts" in the Guild Shop - it looks like Vol 1 is available as a free download. .