What Did You Do Today 2025

[BazyleParticipant @bazyle]

Pity to hear the bad news Nigel. I note this is the first I have heard of this project. Maybe regular updates on here, even an idea of the location, would have helped.
The original Exeter club, decades ago, was at a farm and you can still see the outline of the track on Google Earth. Not sure how/why it stopped. The new EDMES has made major progress over 3 years and hope to have a full circle complete at St Katherine’s Priory mid summer. It is largely a handful of very keen organisers that boost it along.
At our public running yesterday a member had visited Taunton who it transpires had in just 4 years built an extensive multigauge track (2 1/2 to 7 1/4 ) both ground level and raised in just 4 years. Again we didn’t hear anything about it on here.

[Nigel Graham 2Participant @nigelgraham2]

Thankyou Bazyle.

Yes – I am impressed by what the Exeter and Taunton clubs have achieved!

I was discreet because this was not a model-engineering society project throughout, more a sort of mutual arrangment with a farmer thinking he could attract visitors to his farm, and wanting a miniature railway as part of it. Although near Swanage and with a camp-site even nearer, the chance of success was always slim and I think the owner came to realise this.

I can though give something of our group’s background.

 

Our first incarnation, with a few more members, was Purbeck Miniature Railway, based in Purbeck School in Wareham; but eventually we had to leave the site for various reasons including building work on the school itself.

There, we had built a ground-level 7-1/4″ g. railway, operated very successfully on the school’s monthly car-boot sales; but those ended and in due course so did our permissive tenure, hastened possibly by the retirement of the one member who was a teacher there.

As far as I know the formation is all still there. We donated the two turntables (one each end of the line) and a functioning, mechanical signal box, to other clubs; and eventually gave the lifted track to the farm project.

 

In its heyday in the school grounds, PMR took over a small outbuilding originally built as a Biology Lab outpost, and fitted it as a workshop.

We built a station near the workshop, with the signal box for the station’s two-road starter signals; the station exit points and an advance stop signal, used when the turntable beyond the station being operated. The single line’s token was a short steel bar with a big loop, hung on a lever on the outer starter signal post so its weight brought the signal “off”. The driver unhooking it to take it with him, allowed the signal “on”.

The public access station was at the far end from all that, with two-road station and turntable, and its own signals. We could, and normally did, operate each train with one locomotive “down” and a second returning “up”. This became elaborated to two trains and two locomotives alternating directions, even sometimes three locos, with passengers changing trains at what to them was the remote station.

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One of the turntables – plus a lot of very heavy rail, a petrol-engined locomotive and some rolling-stock – had come from Weymouth & District MES’ original track on Portland; closed when a new landowner decided to build a skate-park there! (Which did not last long, as we thought it wouldn’t.) That line was a 3.5, 5 and 7.25″ raised oval, with the turntable in the running-line to serve three steaming-bays. At Purbeck School we built a cylindrical, brick-lined pit of corresponding depth, for it.

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In the hiatus of a few years between the school and farm projects, we helped restore and operate the two-foot gauge demonstration line at Purbeck Mining Museum, adjacent to Norden Station on the preserved Swanage Railway.

The Museum occupies the former transfer site for ball-clay brought along narrow-gauge railways from local clay-pits, onto Standard Gauge trains. It owns two Ruston diesel locomotives; one originally in service on that private quarry network. We also had for a time, a Hunslet steam locomotive on loan from Hampshire Narrow Gauge Society, and used it on “Driver-For-A-Fiver” events for Museum fund-raising, in return for servicing it.

Norden Station itself, overlooked by Corfe Castle ruin, is not original to that location, but was built there by the preservation group to be the normal SR terminus combined with a Council park-&-ride. The line is connected and signalled to Network Rail’s London – Weymouth main-line, but so far at least only rare specials come down the branch.

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PMR has gone but there are two active ME societies in East Dorset: Wimborne and Bournemouth. I gather you need join Wimborne via a company sports and social club, as the wonderfully-designed 5″g. track is on its property. Bournemouth has a raised line, but although multi-gauge its weight limit precludes most 7.25″g locos. I have had the pleasure as guest, of riding round the Wimborne line, and driving on Bournemouth’s circuit.

Half way (ish) between Bournemouth and Taunton are the Weymouth and Yeovil, clubs. Weymouth has a decent length of ground-level 5 & 7.25″ line, plus a non-scenic, raised 16mm-scale circuit and lots of space for ministaure traction-engines to explore.

Sorry Yeovil, I don’t know your facilities!

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W&DMES thrives, now in a school grounds after some years of its own nomadic life after from losing a characterful but rented workshop on Portland (a victim of the Uniform Business Rate). Err, the adjective describes the workshop, not the habituees. Though…

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