It’s one of those strange months when the 2nd Sunday immediately follows the 1st Thursday, so our ESNG meeting was immediately followed by a PlayDay.  So we have another ESNG post, to be followed this week by some pictures from the Tolworth (Hampton Court club) exhibition.

Following the traditional curry, where Miles reduces the profit margins of the Ruchita, we headed for the hall and set up a good sized circuit, including Paul’s Kato layout, as seen at the Scout’s show.

And the members poured in.  I counted 14 members, plus the offspring of two members, plus my better half who dropped in for a chat and to sample Miles’ most excellent fruit cake.  However, strangely, there seemed to be plenty of room to run trains, as people seemed happy to chat for a lot of the afternoon.  Paul had, of course, diverted all his Japanese stock onto his layout…..

And Sean was demonstrating the wonders of DCC on a little layout on a table…..

So I actually ran some of my trains.  A couple of second hand Farish diesels headed a new (second hand) rake of Gresley coaches….

I then swapped locomotives for a ‘Peak’ class.  I have always liked this diesel – far more than the similarly 1-Co-Co-1 Class 40 – and took a punt at one on Ebay.  It runs fine, and has been renumbered and named as D1, Scafell Pike.

Brian carried out running repairs on the admittedly dodgy trackwork…

There was plenty of modern image stock on show….

Simon and Graham provided American superpower….

And of course Brian videoed the afternoon…..

An excellent afternoon!  There’ll be no Wednesday meeting this month, due to Stuttgart that week, so our thoughts now turn to preparations for Germany.  At least the latest Brexit delay means that we can get into Europe freely – I’ve been joking with the Cha(I)rman that he should have been queueing on the M2 since September, just to make sure that he got to Europe with the railway.