Posted by Smartarse
on Mon 22 Feb 10, 6:10 PM to Smartarse's blog.
Spent Sunday wandering round the local railway museum. It was shut for the winter so we came home. However it did put me in mind of a railway club I was once thinking of joining.
The Wormwood Railway Appreciation Society met on a Monday and initially started off with four groups: the steam buffs, the locomotive number collectors, the railway modellers and the diesel enthusiasts. The railway modellers weren't as interested in discussing real railways as the others so they started a separate meeting on a Tuesday. The number collectors got fed up with being called trainspotters and started having their own meeting on a Wednesday. The steam buffs and the diesel enthusiasts found they had the hall to themselves most Mondays. Without the neccesity of discussing the best way of indexing collected sightings, or the difficulty of creating steam pipes in 4mm scale, their discussions quickly deteriorated into the old diesel versus steam argument. Eventually, after many bitter exchanges the diesel enthusiasts decided to have their meeting on a Thursday.
Meanwhile the Tuesday meetings had become loud and belligerent debacles. Jenkins who had never spoken a word at the general meeting suddenly emerged as an evangelistic advocate of O-Gauge and refused to let the 4mm modellers speak. 'It's not a true scale' he'd argue and 'the guage doesn't adhere to prototype.' But many suspected he was just gaugist and considered anything less than 7mm too small to bother with. After a particularly bitter Tuesday meeting, the non-7mm modellers went down the pub to have a postmortem. The upshot of that drunken outing was that the HO/OO gaugers decided to meet on Fridays while the narrow gaugers decided they could live with modelling in different scales but they really only wanted to talk about railways of the narrower gauge.
By this time the steam buffs had split into the Great Western group, the LNER group, the Southern Railways group and the LMS group. Demand for the Society hut now exceeded the number of week nights it was available. The diesel group - which by this point had split to become the diesel enthusiasts, the electric fans and the trams related group - suggested the contruction of a second shed. The trainspotters said they were too busy to help and anyway they prefered to huddle in an open shelter. The railway modellers decided to build their own hut - half the size - out of balsa wood and cardboard.
The construction of the second hut fell to volunteers from the steam buffs and diesel enthusiasts. Sadly they couldn't agree on the achitectural style. The steams buffs wanted a traditional brick and tile construction while the diesel enthusiasts wanted a modern steel frame and corrugated sheet style.
Things ended badly when a stray spark from the Halls class 4-6-2, newly acquired by the GWR group, set fire to the railway modellers hut during a meeting to resolve their scale issues. A later enquiry established that the main cause of the large casualty count was that doors and windows were fractionally too small to permit escape and that all the fire safety equipment was made from macaroni.
(sigh)
