Hello People…

Well now we have taken control of the website its time to give you an update on the club….

Firstly i must give a HUGE thank you to Chris Morgan of http://www.bluegoldfish.com/ who stepped in to help me in my time of need when i was looking for a new website/server provider. Please if you would like a website or more information about hosting etc then please contact him on chris.morgan@bluegoldfish.com

As for this website here is an update on what has been happening…

• I have updated all the links and reinstated all the links that i previously had from the last website. Hopefully these will not disappear every month like the last one.
• The now and then section has had most of its photographs returned with a few outstanding waiting for more photo’s required.
• Each section within the website has had writing added below each photograph to give an explanation of it.

Now for the layouts….

Ramsbottom

Since the last report on the old website, We have been busy nearly every week working on different things to improve the layout.

• A left hand curved point just behind Ramsbottom Signal Box on the level crossing has been replaced due to damage sustained over the years of running also it was discovered that the point in front of this one was causing a few problems after the previous was replaced caused by the nose of the point being slightly raised this was repaired by Mark Towers giving it a gentle persuasion knock was a toffee hammer. This seems to of sorted it out for now.
• Keith Cragg has remade the fence that once stood opposite the above point untill the point gave way and an engine derailed resulting in demolished fence. This new fence is made from small tubes of plastic painted brown.
• Roger Wilson has for a few weeks been working on Ramsbottom Cricket Club’s playing field that has needed an upgrade since the repaint of the building. Originally we wanted to use scatter material to relayout the ground but this is now hard to find as most companies have moved on to flock material instead. The previous was made from what looked like sand paper stuck down on plaster and painted a light shade of green. We have now recovered the playing field in some sourced scatter material with Roger laying the crease area this week. He has also started to repaint the crowd and benches around the ground.
• Keith Cragg has also sorted out the problems on the signalling front of the layout. After weeks of the signals operating in a spazam mode which itself was intermittent we finally solved it after carefully tracking it down and seperating the rest of the system from the front control board by its own plug. The fault was a down to a faulty rectifier which converts the the DC supply to AC for controlling the signals.
• Over the past couple of weeks me, Alex King and Keith Cragg have had to resolder the odd broken wires off the rear control board, replaced 2x push to make switches, replaced 4x point motors that have decided to give up on us, replaced 3x street lights with complete wiring, replaced one tender on 8F 48705, Trying our hand with Metcalfe Engine shed kit, denating some items of old stock to the East Lancashire Railway’s Bury Standard Four Group’s Shop, Replaced all the triang type wagons with new wheels.
• I had aquired a display board while ago but never got round to using it so for this years open evening (20-10-2011) i have decided to put it to use to give the history of a few of the buildings that we have modelled such as Ramsbottom and Stubbins Stations, Ramsbottom Paper Mill, Kays Soap Works and Ramsbottom Cricket Club. 

Bacup

Bacup has come on leaps and bounds since the last real report on the previous website. As present the shed is almost made with the final roof sections being put in place, this will in the coming weeks be having lights fitted but will be dimmed down to look real rather than full brightness. No work on the current base boards has started yet due to other commitments on the Ramsbottom Layout.

Visits

We have had a number of visitors recently from different places :-

• Volunteers from the Sue Ryder Charity Shop paid us a visit lately and were rather impressed with what they saw at the club and had a good chin wag with the members about the good old days of Ramsbottom.
• The Landlord and Landlady of The Railway Hotel have been a few times to admire our layout (and their pub in 00 gauge) and to bring a few of their customers.
• Last week we had Peter and David Bootland who had come down to see what all the fuss of our layout was about after finding a link to us via the Summerseat Ward Family website so it helps to have links within the local community. They seemed really impressed and want to start a layout of Summerseat. They have opted to become members of our club and hopefully we can help each other.

Me and Alex in recent weeks have been down a few nights of the week to run trains around to the program to seem how the layout responds with the current program and new additions. Well the first start was not good having all of the Accrington lines full when your next move was a train up to Accrington but you live and learn.

We hope to have a group run soon for the openday with the layout being cleaned and looking well.

I will take some pictures of the updates this Thursday to show you how the layouts looking.

Cheers

Dan