Cumbria Area Group Inaugural Meeting

Area Group Organizer Stephen Paulin has arranged an inauguaral meeting for this embryonic group to take place at his home The Station Master's House, Midland Hill, Kirkby Stephen on Saturday 12th April at 12 noon. The plan is to have lunch at the Black Bull in Nateby followed by a general discussion on what people would like to achieve with the group and then to try and plan some further meetings. If everybody brings a modelling project we could have a discussion on those too. MAP
Anyone interested in coming along can contact Stephen at either: s.paulin@merseymail.com or Stephen.Paulin@silverbeck-rymer.co.uk Further details on the Blue Sheet.

SNAG at Rail 2008

Members of SNAG the Scalefour Netherlands Area Group will be attending and helping out with the UK layouts appearing at the Rail 2008 Exhibition at Houten on 7th-9th March.
More details on the SNAG section of the Scalefour Society website.

ALL POINTS COVERED

Another hard weekend's work has been completed in the East Of Scotland with yet more work done towards extending Burntisland 1883. The west end of the layout now seems some distance off when viewed from the east end.........

No-one was quite sure how that new three way point would perform but everyone had their own ideas ............
Everyone ..........except Allan Ferguson who was still booging on down to the freebie Lenny Kravitz CD given away with Saturday's Daily Mail. Don't such rags realise the impact on serious finescale modelling?

On Saturday we had a visit from some of the West of Scotland group keen to learn how a layout should be built. Their excuse for venturing east was to measure up the SRPS' signal box at Bo'ness. However no-one was taken in by that as the SRPS are well aware of what their box measures.

Saturday was rounded off with an inter-group quiz with questions set by our own David Goodwillie - no bias there then. The steam questions were very hard, but the diesel questions harder still. As usual our Alasdair Taylor was the runaway winner with a score of something like 13 out of 40.

That's the working weekends finished for the meantime but a number of the group will be meeting up next weekend at Modelrail in Glasgow where Blackston Junction will be exhibited. Jim Summers will be dividing his time between that layout and also manning the Scalefour Society and the Caledonian Railway Association's stands - some guys don't let the grass grow under their feet.

SNAG Bijeenkomst

The latest meeting of the Scalefour Netherlands Area Group (SNAG) took place on 10th February at the home of Gerco van Zetten in Bodegraven. There was a very good turn out and we had a most enjoyable afternoon. Activities included: a tour of Gerco's workshop including a chance to look at some of his wonderful P87 loco's and rolling stock; a DVD of Den Bosch 98, featuring Wim's 'Pippin Lane' Vincent de Bode's 'Flintfield' and Iain Rice's 'Bodesmeer'; we also had many interesting discussions and several members brought along their recent creations to show the rest of the group, including Jos Blatter's latest etchings, jigs and tools.
Attention now moves to the Rail 08 exhibition next month in its new location in Houten, where there will be several visitors from the UK. For details see http://www.rail.nl/
The picture above shows Wolter (nearest the camera) and clockwise: Piet, Wim and Dave discussing plans for a new station building. For more pictures follow this link to the meeting report on the SNAG webpages.

Fylde Area Group

The 17th January saw our 'Run and Natter' session with a smaller that usual number of members, down to 9 members, but in view of the weather this could be classed as brilliant!

Anyway there was a wide variety of locos 'on trial' with a large contingent of LNER locos from Arthur, a number of which had run on Preston before. We also saw a new GWR loco (don't know the class - sorry!) from Peter which had suffered some chimney reshaping due to an accidental drop during weathering, butI think a good night was had by all.

A note that our next meeting planned to be a Video and Internet night, will actually be a 'Run and Natter' meeting due to overrunning engineering works (well decorating actually), so please bring items of interest and stock/locomotives to run.

Next meeting Thursday 21st February, please contact mike Norris (details on Blue Sheet) if you require additional information.