GMES Newsletter - May 2025 (Web)

Stoke Park Railway Gala Week-end Bryan Finch

This year’s Gala Week-End is on 5th and 6th July, and the format will be much the same as the past Galas.

On Wednesday 4th June at 7.30pm, there will be the usual pre-Gala meeting to which all members are invited. This meeting will be held in the Clubhouse and will be an opportunity to learn what is going on and where volunteers are needed for all the jobs that need doing. So please put the date in your diary now.

Exhibition - The exhibition stand will be set up in the Clubhouse.

On the Saturday, the stand will be used for an Arts & Crafts display, which will build on the successful ‘What our partners (and other family members) do whilst we’re in our sheds’ display that has been a feature in past years.

There will also be space for Arts & Crafts items made by any of our members who participate in this area as well as doing model engineering. On the Sunday, the stand will be used for a GMES members’ model engineering display. We still have all our cups that we have awarded in previous years, and we want to continue awarding them. The Mayor of Guildford has been invited to come to the Gala on the Sunday, have a guided tour, and present the awards.

We invite members to bring along examples of their work to be displayed, and to be judged if they wish. As has been said on many occasions before, models do not need to completed in order to be displayed or judged. A ‘work in progress’ model revealing all that’s going on inside can be very informative to both the public and other model engineers.

An Exhibition Entry Form for the Arts & Crafts, or model engineering exhibits is available via the Documents Page in the Members’ Section of the GMES website, Gala 2025 Members Entry Form, or on the Clubhouse window sill. Closing date for entries is Friday 6th June.

Manpower needs - Railways - The passenger carrying railways will be in use throughout the week-end with visiting motive power, supple-

mented by GMES locomotives, and members’ own locomotives. So the usual level of steaming bay support, driving, guarding, and station staffing will be required.

Catering - this year we will again be doing our own catering. Neil Heptonstall is organising the morning BBQ and has already gathered his team. The afternoon catering – teas, and cakes, etc. needs a team leader, and also volunteers to serve our visitors. As usual, we will need homemade cakes.

Event set-up - on preceding Thursday and Friday: signage needs putting up, exhibition stand needs assembly in Clubhouse, gazebos need putting up, trestle tables need to be distributed around the site, the two boat ponds will need to be put up, and then there’s general site tidying and preparation.

So, there’s plenty to do.

Event tear-down - on following Monday: putting trestle tables away, dismantle and store exhibition stand, empty, dismantle and store boat ponds, taking gazebos down, and more ‘stuff’ that needs putting away.

There are separate on-line sign-up sheets for Saturday and Sunday for volunteers to offer their help.

There are also a number of Gala Information pages accessible from the GMES Website. Details of traders and displays, information for members, information for visitors, etc.

Treasurer’s Doodlings Chris Phillips

Open Days

Open Days are now our largest source of income and so as well as being enjoyable to run (I hope), the success of these events is crucial to our ability to pay for all the all the other stuff we need.

We have run two Open Days so far this year.

Our first Open Day of this year on Sunday 16th March 2025 was blessed with sunny but cold weather and we had a good turnout of members and visitors.

So much so, that we had our third best ever Open Day with takings of £2,623, just £15 shy of July 2023 and £75 short of our best ever in April last year. This was despite not having ice cream, the boats or traction engine.

• We sold over 1,178 railway tickets, taking £1,912

• The Ladies sold out of cakes and almost everything else, taking £629

• We took £82 at the Driver Experience track. The trains ran very reliably, and the worst queue was that at the Ticket Office - we could not sell them fast enough!

Our second Open Day on Sunday 13th April 2025 experienced the first rain in Guildford for at least three weeks, however, children are waterproof, and we had a good turnout of members and visitors.

The final figures show takings of £2,268.

• We sold over 954 railway tickets, taking £1,535

• The Ladies again sold out of cakes taking £643

• We took £82 at the Driver Experience track.

The takings at the Driver Experience track are limited by the length of the afternoon divided by the ability of the ‘trainers’ to run backwards and forwards alongside the ‘trainee’. Well done to those members who come along to submit to an afternoon of keep fit! Younger, fitter members would be most welcome to come along and relieve the few that keep this very popular attraction going for our young visitors.

Well done to all and thank you to all that turned up to help. These events are essential to support the finances of the society as well as providing a visible benefit to the community who, in turn, support our events.

Insurance Reminder

Guildford Model Engineering Society has insurance under the Federation of Model Engineering Scheme to cover:

Our Property:

• Buildings, Contents, Portable Tracks, Boating Pools etc.

• Locomotives & Rolling Stock.

Our Liabilities:

• £5 million for Public Liability for members and officers

• £1 million for Directors and Officers Liability

• £1 Million for Boiler Testers Liability

As part of this policy, (and as a consequent direct benefit of being a GMES Member), Individual members are automatically covered for Public Liability (excluding Road Traffic Act) under the GMES policy, when undertaking model engineering activities, whether as a GMES activity or on their own, up to the GMES limit of indemnity, currently £5 million.

Should you need to provide evidence of insurance, perhaps when visiting an event, certificates are available from the Treasurer or Secretary.

However, the GMES policy does not cover your models and other property at any time even while they are at GMES. You need to arrange cover for these yourself.

You may be able to add these to your household insurance, or set-up a stand-alone policy.

As a GMES member you can also get cover from Walker Midgley at a 10% Federation discount. Walker Midgley can offer advice as to the appropriate policy. They also offer policies to cover Trailers, Personal Accident, Home Workshop & Garden Railways.

Contact Walker Midgley (details below) with the reference ‘GMES Federation’ Insurance.

 Email: Alison.cinnamond@walkermidgley.co.uk

 Phone:Alison Cinnamond 0114 250 2770

 www.walkermidgley.co.uk

I hope this piece provides some clarity to our insurance position. If you have questions, please contact Walker Midgley who are qualified and licenced to offer help.

The Golden Pot ceremony Neil Heptonstall

It was a tradition with trans-continental railways and riveted bridges to have a golden spike/rivet ceremony – usually staged with suspiciously polished tools!

The new Signals’ Ducting team held a ‘golden pot’ ceremony on Thursday 20th March at midday!

We have been using the name ‘pot’ for the black items fitted as required around the orange ducting to facilitate installing branch cabling to trackside kit.

The ceremony really does mark the end of a massive operation to install all the ducting. This followed months of design and estimating the scale required. The new signals and track circuits were all located then small white pegs for the required pot(s). Most of the ducts were found to need to be 4” and some branches (with less cabling) 2”.

This diagram shows the ducting extents – black dots indicate that pots are on this line – not their actual location. Because of the volume of local cabling needed in the GL station’s area, an additional duct – the T duct – was installed to by-pass

right through the area for cabling needed further away.

We must thank the ‘regulars’ trenching and ducting but have always appreciated helpers!

While about half of the trenching was done by hand we did hire a 0.8 tonne machine to make better progress on the rest.

We realised that pulling/pushing fat long cables through the main ducts could be difficult, so we incorporated underground ‘cabling boxes’ at key positions and mid-way on one long length.

Cable connections will no longer be ‘in the field’ but there will be four cabinets (IDFs), usually below a convenient bridge and served by a branch up from the main duct’s cabling box.

So that we don’t have to do more digging in the future, a 2” black duct has been installed round the entire circuit for future mains electrics - the E duct. (Not shown on the diagram but it is generally below the 4” orange).

After a short break, we will return to the new signal box constructing a much better flight of steps for access and starting the trays etc in the undercroft for cable management.

Designs for the GL and RT signal systems and for the fit-out of the signal box itself are now well advanced. Commissioning the new system for RT remains our priority - it does share cabling, cabinets, some signal posts etc with the GL system.

How we built the Watercress Line A talk by Keith Brown

We welcomed Keith from the Watercress Line whose talk and slide illustrations covered the formation of the Watercress Line in 1979 until the ‘end of the beginning’ when the line was opened from Alton to Alresford in 1985.

Keith began with a brief history of the line from conception as the Alton, Alresford and Winchester Railway Company built to join Alton with Winchester in 1861. In 1865 it was renamed the Mid-Hants Line and opened the same year operated by the London and South Western Railway (LSWR). A long lease to the LSWR was agreed in 1880 and the business was sold to the LSWR in 1884. It was a single track 18 miles long and had some very steep gradients including three miles of 1 in 60.

Nothing much happened after that, as the line was impecunious and a secondary line to the main Woking to Winchester line to the west. In 1937 the line was electrified from London to Alton which meant passengers to further destinations had to change trains. Services were gradually run down until the section of the line from Alton to Winchester closed on the 4th February 1973. Some track was removed and the buildings allowed to become derelict.

There were immediate calls to preserve the line, and a company called Mid-Hants Limited was formed by a news reporter called Simon Nieve. He had contacts with the Oxford University Railway Society . At Easter 1973 the first working party was held. This didn't really amount to much and shortly

afterwards John Taylor Winch, the Town Clerk of the rural council, was tasked with saving the line and formed the Winchester and Alton Railway Limited to save the whole line. In May 1975 a million-pound share prospectus was launched but did not make anywhere near the target amount, so the company had to cut back its ambitions which culminated in buying three miles of track, mostly at the Alresford end of the line and a short section of track just outside Alton Station. Whilst this was proceeding, the first locos were starting to appear on the line. The first locomotive was a Bagnall tank, now at Peak Rail, then Slough Estates No.3, a 0-6-0, now at the Middleton Railway. Then the Urie Society owned LSWR S15 4-6-0 No. 506 arrived and is still running there today. Larger locomotives started to appear on the line, including West Country class Bodmin, which was restored in a siding at Ropley.

April 1977 saw the first train run under the auspices of the Winchester and Alton Railway Limited from Alresford to Ropley.

Initially trains ran from Arlesford to Ropley M Pearsom

The infrastructure started to be attended to as well with buildings from other locations being dismantled and brought on site. The buffet at Alresford was formerly the station building at Lyme Regis. Signal boxes at Netley and Wilton South moved to Ropley and Medstead respectively and placed on new brick bases on the old foundations. The box at Alton was originally on platform one but was moved to its current position outside the station.

Building the Iron (concluded)

Machine tools used to manufacture parts were controlled by skilled operators using micrometers for measurement doing hand calculations using paper, pen or pencil. Sometimes the pencil would be high tech with a rubber at the other end for 'deleting'.

No digital readouts, handheld calculators were yet to be invented, no mobile telephones and no internet with Google searches. This was what they called 'hands on' engineering with teams of men constantly on their feet unlike so many of today’s sedentary tasks. Transportation of finished goods was by British manufactured vehicles like Foden, Atkinson, Leyland, Scammell, AEC etc. Where did they all go? Coal mines were at full tilt all over the country keeping power stations running, steam power keeping the railways

Bits & Pieces

February 2025

Nigel Valvona brought along his latest 3D printing project, to demonstrate some of the principles he mentioned in his recent talk on 3D printing. The success of the printing is all in the CAD design. If this is well thought out the parts should just fit together. The project is a glider in PLA plastic with a one and a half metre wingspan.

The glider fuselage consists of a printed nose and tail, joined by a body made from a cardboard tube. The cardboard tube runs through the hollow printed parts to provide the strength to the body. The walls of the plastic parts are one and a half millimetres thick. The wings are printed in sections as a diamond shaped lattice of typical aerofoil section with holes through the spars to insert strengthening carbon rods through to remove

chuffing along, though soon to be superseded by and converted to diesel. We manufactured cars and aircraft with much to come and exported product all over the world as well as looking after our domestic requirements. If anything, extra was needed we took care of it ourselves. Engineering was a core subject in education; industry encouraging schoolboys to reproduce working miniatures of their end product with Meccano for engineering and Balsa wood for model aircraft. Oh, how very different from today with thumb dancing on handheld computer tablets with lifeless pictures.

Please take a moment to see synopsis of BUILDING THE IRON on Geoffrey’s website: http://www.diggerynook.com

flex. The wing covering is a thin plastic film that is ironed on.

There was a discussion in a recent Bits & Pieces on how to make a small cam. Prompted by this, Ivan Hurst described the cam actuated poppet valve regulator in his five-inch gauge locomotives. The design was based on a design by Gordon Smith in Engineering in Miniature, May 2008. He started delving into them because he found disc designs did not seal properly.

Ivan made one improvement to the cam. When the valve was in the closed position, the surface on the cam where the rod touched was filed flat to ensure the valve was completely closed. Ivan hand filed the cam and increased the radius Ivan’s improved poppet valve

The various components and sub-assemblies were illustrated with slides.

Bits & Pieces (concluded)

Peter Stage has a friend who is a member of the model rocket fraternity.

Some very competitive international competitions are held, mainly between England, the USA and the Russians. At the end of the national championships there is some light relief when the competition for novelty rockets is held. Peter brought in one of these, which consisted of three paper mache elephants, with trunks extended skywards, to form the body of the rocket. It successfully flew and landed without too much damage.

March 2025

Bill Read kicked off this evening's proceedings with a quick update on the track cleaning van he is building. It has been painted Midland Maroon but was applied a bit too watered down and has dried a paler, almost pink, shade. It will need to be weathered to make it look more realistic.

Nigel Valvona has purchased an unusual sevenand-a quarter inch gauge loco built by an engineer in about the year 2000: a Crampton locomotive named Liverpool. His intention is to dismantle it and rebuild it with improvements. The sale included the engine, tender and a period carriage. The locomotive has run but the steel boiler, a modified Burrell design was last certified in two thousand and eight.

An internet article states ‘two locomotives were bought by the LNWR, including a 6-2-0 (or is it a 2-2-2-2 or even a 4-2-2?) Liverpool built by Bury, Curtis and Kennedy in 1848 with 8-feet diameter driving wheels. A claim of 79 miles per hour being achieved was made, with an average of 53 miles per hour over 30 miles with a 60-ton load. Another claim was for a speed of hauling eight carriages over 16 miles at an average speed of 74 miles per hour.’ I'm glad I wasn't on the footplate to experience this. When built it was claimed to

be the most powerful locomotive in the world. With the aid of a slide show Nigel described how the chimney, boiler and cladding has been removed and the chassis disassembled.

Martyn Harrold continues to work on his GWR tank locomotive, this time concentrating on fitting the safety valve bonnet over the safety valve assembly. The bonnet is a 3D printed lost wax casting and unfortunately did not fit first time. Martyn had to carefully thin the inside walls of the casting to fit over the safety valves using calipers to measure the wall thickness as he proceeded.

Martyn is also working in parallel constructing a B.R. Class 3 tank locomotive. These have small top feed clacks with eight or ten B.A. studs holding the clack onto the flange on the boiler.

Martyn has made a jig to make the bronze gaskets but was not very happy with the result.

So he tried an alternative method using a thin sheet of brass cut into a square with a tube through it that passes through an ‘O’ ring. The tube being 10 thousandths smaller than the ring. These comfortably hold 135 psi under test. Martyn prefers ‘O’ rings to gaskets and tries to use them whenever possible.

Book Review - Battle of the Boilers Martyn Harrold

Like most Live Steam model builders of my generation, I grew up following LBSC’s “words and music” in the Model Engineer magazine and we all owe him a debt of gratitude for taking the mystique out of the making process. He made it all sound so straightforward. Without him the hobby would probably be in a very different place now.

Brian Hollingsworth wrote a very good book in 1982 called LBSC His Life and Locomotives which gave a good insight into the life of Curly Lawrence. Unfortunately, there are some errors in it, in particular in regard to his early life. That is not surprising as Curly’s birth details are not easy to establish. We had a talk at club some years ago and the speaker was also confused about Curly’s beginnings and suggested some strange ideas as to why the beginnings are not clear.

A few years ago, I was buying a book privately through the internet and I spoke to Geoff Johnson who told me that he and Ian Pollard had spent a long time researching LBSC’s birth and early years and he was pretty sure that they had solved the problem, certainly as far as it is possible to do with the records that exist. Unfortunately, they didn’t want to spend any more time researching and was hoping that someone would take up the challenge of completing the research. He kindly sent me a copy of what they had found out and written up.

This new book by Eddie Castellan acknowledges the research done by Geoff and Ian and uses the newly established facts in his new book.

It is not surprising that the confusion about

LBSC’s early life exists as he had three surnames during his lifetime. He was born William Benjamin but early in his life his family changed their name to Matthieson and later LBSC changed his name to Lillian Lawrence but always referred to himself as Curly in his writings. There is evidence that Curly exaggerated or enhanced his railway experiences which also tends to confuse the story.

Castellan’s book covers this and goes on to compare what Curly wrote in his words and music with the facts that can be established from company and other records.

It also throws light on the production work that he did during the war, being in charge of a team of women machinists and how he found ways to work around problems as he could bend the normal rules of engineering during those times. We benefitted from that experience through his ‘ints and tipsies’ in his writings.

Although this new book covers the Battle of the Boilers saga, the majority of the book covers the Locomotives that he built, repaired or modified and the sheer numbers are astonishing. Apparently, he worked from 7am till midnight, which when you look at the locomotives he worked on and the articles and designs that he produced, is believable.

An interesting fact emerged later in the book. Castellan says that LBSC’s driving trolley was given to GMES after his death. I wonder if anyone knows what happened to it?

As an aside, some years ago I gave to the club a framed note written by LBSC to a friend of my father who asked a question regarding Britannia, does anyone know where that went to?

I recommended to our Librarian that we buy a copy of this book for our library but unfortunately the book had sold out. There were only 500 copies printed, I bought mine from Geoff Stait of GS Models and when I rang him recently to check the availability of the book, he was in the process of trying to persuade Eddie Castellan to organise a further publishing run. However, Geoff had a copy reserved by a customer who didn’t collect it and he sold it to GMES and it is now in our library.