Sticking point

There are six points on Minories, all operated with Tortoise slow action point motors with Exactoscale baseplates transferring the movement of the motor through a tie-bar under the baseboard to wires soldered to the underside of the switch rails. There are stretcher bars between the switch rails, and although these do provide some mechanical joints between the two switch …read more.

Putnam – October update

Following Putnam’s last showing at the London Festival of Railway Modelling in March, work has commenced on expanding the side of the layout away from public view.  The storage sidings, now shared with the clubs a-building modern image OO gauge layout Ingatestone, are being increased from 8 to 13 lines.  The Club’s carpentry whizz has …read more.

What, more rolling stock?

One may wonder why a layout of this vintage still needs new rolling stock. When the main Happisburgh layout was sold to MRC and GOG member Martin Long, most of the stock was passenger vehicles. A lot of what freight stock we had was returned to its original owners and what we had left was …read more.

Autumn in Happisburgh

We’ve had Alan West’s BTH Class 15 diesel running on Happisburgh Goods for some time. It was constructed from a kit many years ago, but it never looked or ran very well. However, after extensive rebuilding of the mechanism and bogies by the late Peter Elmslie, it at least ran well, and with some very …read more.

New improved Test Tracks in use.

The new outer ring 00 test track’s proved most useful to the guys from “Ingatestone” 00 as they combined their fleet of container wagons into a 1/2  prototypical length  intermodal train as seen on the GE route from Felixstowe into London.  We hope to run trains of this size on the layout with class 66, 70, 86 & 90’s …read more.

Converting Heljan Class 23 to EM

The Heljan Class 23 is one of the simpler conversions to EM gauge. I don’t think there are any revolutionary ideas here, but hope this may be of use to anyone else contemplating the conversion or looking for an easy one to start with.     The model as supplied picks up electricity from the …read more.

Ingatestone’s September running day

Last Thursday Ingatestone had a demo / running night so we all brought some stock in to run on the two big end boards. Chris had his class 90 – a work in progress upgrade from the Hornby original whilst James had the old “One Anglia” livery version ‘out of the box’ so we could …read more.

Ballasting on Ingatestone

I still get a bit of a buzz when the postman has a parcel for me and yesterday I took delivery of two laser cut kits from Lazor Works. With  some adaption these should make a fair model of the signal box at Ingatestone. Mo has been busy at home working more traditionally on the …read more.

Ingatestone’s back from its holidays

The summer is often a down time for modellers, as family holidays, the gardening and BBQ’s take over. But we have been continuing with work on Ingatestone mostly on Board 6 (the big corner board that goes into the fiddle yard) with what in the photo looks like a complicated amount of wire and points is …read more.

Bulletin 493

The November / December 2016 edition of The Bulletin is on its way to members, featuring a range of interesting articles all written by members, including: A preview of our forthcoming special event on 20th November, with articles on “Koindu and Moa Crossing” and “Trowland” – both S-scale There’s a look back at early S-Scale modelling A …read more.

Bulletin 492

The September/October 2016 edition of The Bulletin is on its way to members, featuring a range of interesting articles all written by members, including: Andrew David previews his November lecture at Keen House, exploring the connection between the Great Central Railway and Quintinshill Ian Lamb writes about the Borders Railway Three book reviews Reminiscences of the prototype …read more.

Skills Transfer Days 2016/7

One of The MRC’s aims is to ensure that modelling skills are passed on to the next generation. It’s perhaps easy for experienced modellers to forget how daunting it was to take some of those key steps in developing techniques, and all too easy for the less experienced to put something in the ‘too difficult’ category.

So we’re continuing our series of ‘skills transfer’ days, to allow a small group of people to try out something they may not have tried before with more experienced modellers on hand to help them. During the day each attendee will work on the kit/parts supplied to learn the techniques and hopefully take home a working model. These courses have been running successfully since 2009, and have been popular with positive feedback. Space is limited on each course, so please book early.

The courses take place at Keen House, 4 Calshot Street, London N1 9DA, and generally start at 10am and run until 4pm with a lunch break.

We’re pleased to confirm the following dates: