Welcome to the home page of the Leyland SME. The Society caters for all tastes in the ME world. We meet once a fortnight at the Farrington Conservative Club for talks, lectures or just a chat, and on Sundays and Tuesdays at the track which is located in the beautiful Worden Park on the outskirts of Leyland.
At the Park we have an extensive (1617ft) continuous raised track in 3½ and 5 inch gauges. The ground level seven and a quarter track has been redeveloped. The complete circuit (1 kilometre), station and sidings are now open. Come and have a run!
There is always a warm welcome and a cup of tea waiting for fellow model engineers, prospective new members and interested visitors.
If you would like to run your Loco, please bring a current club membership card, boiler certificate and Spark Arrestor.
It is with great sadness that we report the death on Tuesday the 17th August of long time Leyland member Phil Preston senior. Phil has been a stalwart of the club and one of our boiler inspectors for many years. He will be greatly missed by all of our members
We extend our condolences to his wife and family.
This was a great success, with excellent weather and lots of visitors on both days. Thanks to every one who came and made it such a good weekend. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.
At the request of our secretary's wife we ran a special train for the Girl Guides who are celebrating their centenary this year. It took all our stock, and Arnold's two trucks, hauled by John and Steve's Romuli and Ralph's "Anna" to accommodate all 101 of them! Unfortunately the weather was very wet.
 | Each guide received a badge for her "Blanket" to mark the occasion. |
I have just discovered that Model Engineer Magazine has a website
Welcome to the Leyland SME hosted by "Heart Internet"
This is accessible to the Webmaster by broadband, so updating the site will be much easier.
Please bookmark the new url http://www.leylandsme.co.uk and delete the old sarno.freeserve.co.uk/leyland, which www.leylandsme used to point to.
At the recent "Curly Bowl" competition hosted by Warrington MES, long time Leyland member Adrian Hinchcliffe won first prize with his three and a half inch gauge "Maisie"
Congratulations Adrian!
Adrian and the "Bowl"
Ready for the run.
The "Curly Bowl"or to give it it's full title "The LBSC Memorial Trophy" is a competition sponsored by "Model Engineer" Magazine and held annually. It is awarded to the owner of the best "LBSC" designed locomotive on the day as decided by three judges, who after interviewing the competitor, all drive the loco. It is hosted by a different club each year.
All the trucks are now painted in our corporate red and cream livery apart from three in brown and cream for the Great Western enthusiasts. Foam packings to go between the trucks are now in production.
The trucks have an unusual coupling arrangement and whilst we have a stock of adaptors, including Geoff/Adrian's design of "buffer beam and hook" for those with scale couplings, it is recommended that you construct your own bar to suit your own loco. Here is the drawing:
If that is not very clear Click Here for a printable PDF version of the drawing.
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The good news is that, thanks to the sterling efforts of our President, we have received a substantial grant from the National Lottery's "Awards for All" scheme. This has funded a special riding car for disabled passengers (scroll down for picture) and we are also building some extra general purpose riding cars for the increasing traffic that we now carry. |
Update: The disabled truck now has a fully operational braking system and is proving a big success with wheelchair bound visitors.
Recently, active Leyland member Les Hurst has been confined to a wheel chair and has had to ride in the new disabled truck, pulled by his diesel "Sidewinder"
Les gets "loaded"
The new shed is proving of great benefit to operations at the track, particularly with the cold weather we have been having. See Recent Developments. (Needs Broadband because of big pictures)
BahnTV is run by German State Railways and features railway programmes all the time! Some programmes are professional and some are "Hobbyfilms". All are in German but a lot of the time this doesn't matter. Recent films have featured the Wuppertal overhead railway, the Silverton and Durrango, the Hartz Mountain region railways and the "CopperCanyon" railway in Mexico. It is only available on line now (the Satellite service has been discontinued): Click here.
This is a free dowloadable on-line railway magazine. Arrives as a PDF file. Go to Railway Herald web site You don't actually have to register, you can just download the files.
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Page last updated: 20/08/2010.