N Gauge SouthEast, East Surrey N Gauge 6 April 2019

Lightermans Yard was set up on Friday evening by Keith and Pete K. Unfortunately the one drawback about Friday setups is often wading through rush hour traffic to get to the venue. Throw in a few roadworks and breakdowns and the best laid plans start slipping away. As a result, this time, The Yard was set up a bit more hastily than would have been liked. Nevertheless it all tested out satisfactorily.

To continue the fun on Saturday morning Pete K had a phone call from Keith to say that his car would not start. This resulted in Pete making a hasty detour to pick up Keith but when they arrived at the venue Alan and David S were there and had already fired up the layout and cleaned the track ready for the day. We were careful not to make jokes about a stay alive unit for Keith’s car!

The day itself was very busy especially given the remote location of the venue. Usually at mixed scale shows people are heard authoritatively telling family and friends “Now this is N Gauge”. At this N Gauge show the viewers were all aware of The Yard being finescale and gave very complementary and informed opinions. Some were heard to ask about the more technical aspects of the trackwork and pointwork control. The operating staff from other layouts were also very friendly towards us and, again, said some very nice things about Lightermans Yard.

The coupling/uncoupling problems now seem to be, mostly, behind us. Alan’s latest “Jinty” (fitted with stay a alive unit) performed faultlessly all day whereas the G6 resulted in more sore knuckles for its operators trying to get it past those troublesome spots. We are unanimously convinced that all the short wheelbase locos should be stay alive fitted which should make for a much improved experience from both sides of the backscene.
 

Time to go home and not only did we not have Keith’s car to take half the load but Alan had left his car at home and travelled in David’s saloon car. It was decided that Pete would take all of the big stuff and David would try to fill his boot with smaller boxes and components. After Pete’s car was loaded it was suggested that if he tried harder then he could take the whole lot!!

And so we departed, happy that we had had another good day playing trains.


Many thanks to Pete King for standing in as editor of this report and for the photographs too.

Next meeting Sunday 14 April 2019