Happy New Year

Happy New Year to all our website visitors old and new.

2017 was a fairly quiet year for us, we we're booked for a few exhibitions, unfortunately we had to cancel a couple of appearances due to ill health.  Eaglesham appeared at Ayr and Wakefield shows, whilst Gallowmere appeared at the Perth and Greenock shows.  Two of these shows, Greenock and Wakefield, where new venues for us, and we thoroughly enjoyed both.   

Helenston has been removed from the exhibition circuit, as has Gallowmere, which has been sold on to a new owner.

In between the above, we were busy preparing working on the layouts, Eaglesham was completely rewired, the solenoid point motors were replaced by servos controlled by a Megapoints control board, and the layout is now wired for, and controlled by DCC.   The fiddle yards were also replaced with traversers.  The turntable on Milton Street MPD has been completely rewired and is now controlled by a DCC chip.  We've yet to test this in anger at an exhibition, but so far its running much more reliably than it did with Heljan's gubbins.

Eaglesham's first outing in its DCC and servo guise was the Ayr show, this threw up a couple of issues that were resolved for the next outing at Wakefield, where the layout performed perfectly.  The breakdown crane on the layout received an award at the latter show too!  Bill is continuing Eaglesham's upgrades by replacing the traversers with turntables to cut down on stock handling and potential damage.

Spencer is still working on Muir Street, finalising the final details before construction starts, although he has made a start on the main feature of the layout.  A couple of other projects are in planning, more details when they are finalised.

We ended the year on a new member joining our merry band, Michael Johnston.  We've known Michael since our days at the East Kilbride Model Railway Club and he has helped out as an operator on a couple of occasions.  Michael is a great modeller and pictures of his projects will appear on the site soon.  We just need to test out his tea-making skills...

We are taking a break from exhibiting in 2018 to allow us to concentrate on outstanding projects, our next appearance is at the Falkirk show in November, with Eaglesham.

Overall 2017 was a mixed year for the group.  Successful exhibitions were marred by ill health in between putting us in the very unfortunate position of pulling out of appearances, however things are improving on that side of things and 2019 will see us back to normal. 

Thank you to all longstanding and new visitors to our little corner of the internet, and to those who visit our layouts at exhibitions.

We wish you a happy and prosperous 2018.

Bill, Joe, Keith, Michael & Spencer
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12AD Model Railway Group