Winchester Railway Modellers

WINCHESTER RAILWAY MODELLERS

CHAIRMANS CHATTER, our quarterly newsletter

Finally the weather is good enough for some decent golf... Oops, wrong newsletter! Actually we are now well into the spring exhibition season and it’s been good to see some of our newer members getting involved. There are more opportunities to play trains in the diary so enjoy.

Dave R

Chairman's Chatter
April 2026

General chatter

Thanks to Mr. President Shaw for organising our annual dinner this year aboard the Steamship Shieldhall. Although we were slightly down on numbers due to illness and diary conflicts I think everyone had a pleasant evening. The tour of the bridge and engine room were a nice bonus and entertained the engineering nerds among us.

As is traditional our annual award winners were announced:

The Mick Rich Trophy is presented to the person contributing to 4mm projects and voted for by the members. This years winner is Nick Hargreaves for his continued efforts to get folks involved with Redbridge Wharf..

The Keith Dear Trophy is presented to the person contributing to 7mm projects and voted for by the members. This years winner is Bruce Armstrong for keeping the club’s 7mm efforts in the public eye.

The Peter James Trophy is presented to a member presenting interesting and/or innovative items at the “Show and Tell” evenings. This year the award goes to Andy Keane for his work on the new gantry crane for Redbridge.

The Winchester Trophy is presented to those contributing generally to the club. This year the award goes to Bev and Jerry for their work on getting the new clubroom up and running

Redbridge Wharf (Clive "Watty" Watson)

First Exhibition of the year ticked off and heading towards the NEC at a rate of knots Redbridge is in good shape with just a few minor repairs to carry out.

The Key Model World live at the NEC is probably one of the most prestigious shows of the year so we are looking forward to showing Redbridge off to enthusiasts and modellers from different hobbies

Abbotstone (President Shaw)

We shall continue to run stock on Abbotstone whenever possible, in DCC for a couple more sessions and then transfer back to DC for a time. When Chris is back we shall hopefully explore the fitting of the turntable, the instruments etc. A simplified schedule is now complete for the main line, a similar one for the branch is under way. This should allow more members to get involved in running sessions

President's Ponderings

The arrival of new baseboard parts for the Eastleigh project is encouraging. When the supporting trolleys are finished, we'll better understand the layout's overall size and viewing possibilities at standard height. Roger and I are working together to construct the main station building and footbridge for this layout. Positioned near the viewing area, these features are what visitors to Eastleigh notice from the road. While the station has a long history, modelling it "as at today" helps us capture its current state and unique attributes. After the Basingstoke show, we held a 'wash up' meeting where feedback echoed comments from previous events. Learning to use the NCE cabs is essential for all our DCC layouts—ideally, operating them should feel as familiar as using your TV remote at home. Having a small test track in both 00 and N scales would allow us to practice various functions away from the main layout.

Project "Eastleigh" (Dave R)

At last we have some concrete progress! We have now received the Grainge and Hodder baseboard kits for all twelve of the Eastleigh baseboards and we have started to assemble them. The basic boards seem to go together well and we have only made minor additions to give us timber to insert brass screws to reinforce the track ends. We need to organise a few work groups to get all this timber glued together and painted.

Following on from the baseboards we need to settle on designs for the storage and support for the layout as well as the backscenes and lighting.

The track plan is still evolving with considerable work done on the fiddleyard arrangements and figuring out how to provide a reasonable portrayal of the works in the limited space available.

I note that folks have acquired quite a lot of appropriate N gauge stock already so we really should crack on and build some track! In fact Roger S has spent some time carefully threading rail into plastic sleeper bases to create 20+ meters of plain track. Better build some points then.

How this layout will be operated is something high on the list for discussion. As with Redbridge we need the layout to do all sorts of fancy stuff for exhibitions but also be useable by club members for playing trains without having to do a 3 week operations course.

There is still an awful lot to do…
...and as yet we still don’t have a volunteer to steer this project

Back Issues of Chairmans Chatter

Previous years Chairman's Chatter are available in the archive

Jan 25	Apr 25	Jul 25	Oct_25
Jan 26

All images hosted on Flickr