Our Club Room at Warwick Mill

Following the disaster when our landlord at the Heywood Distribution Park went bankrupt we had to look around and urgently find new premises for the club. After a couple of weeks looking at various buildings and getting nowhere at all, one of our members who was doing some work in Warwick Mill in Middleton said that there was plenty of vacant space on the ground floor and it may be suitable for our urgently required premises. The committee went to investigate and it indeed had good potential to be converted to our needs. After a lot hard work over a period of about 7 months we eventually had the area converted to how we wanted it and the finished result can be seen in the pictures below. The work involved in getting to this position can be seen in the "Archive section" here.

The "Office" area after some alterations to make it seperate from the modelling and temporary messing area.

The "Modelling" and temporary Messing area which have now been split from the "Office" space.

The layout "Lostwood Bridge" that is seen here being re-built following the total failure of the original Heljan Crane that was to load and unload container wagons in a freight yard. This crane seems to be no longer in production and it has been decided to completely change the main theme of this layout and relay some of the tracks.

"Rochwood" one of our older 00 gauge models. The front end of this layout is to be rebuilt in the near future but this will be done on new boards so as to leave the original working until the new sections are completed. The layout works on either Analogue or DCC as required.

"Shawbury" the fine scale 00 layout which has taken some considerable time to get working correctly. It has been rewired twice, the original track plan reversed and the rotating fiddle yard replaced by a cassette system. Shawbury is now operated by DCC only.

"Sumner Brook" 00 gauge Modern Image layout. This is the clubs fixed layout that will not be moved to other exhibitions. It features 4 complete running lines and can be operated on Analogue or DCC on both the inner and outer tracks independently.

N gauge layout "Warwick Mill" which is still under construction. This layout will be the replacement for our earlier N gauge model "Triptan Fell" which was sold after several exhibition appearances.

0 Gauge layout "Wrye". This layout is over 40ft in length and until moving into our current premises we have never been able to have it all erected. The layout can operate under either DCC or Analogue control

The area designated to be the "Workshop". Here there is sufficient space to allow creation of new base boards and most other engineering work.

The latest project is a layout to replace our existing "Thomas" one which has been used at several exhibitions and charity events over the last few years. It will initially be called "Knapford" but once it replaces the existing layout it's name may well change to just "Thomas"

This page amended 4th November 2011