Club History.

While our history may be of interest it should be stressed that we are club moving forward. Membership is increasing, contrary to the experience of so many specialist interest clubs of whatever type. We continue to expand both in terms of membership numbers and the facilities available for members to enjoy and cherish.

The Club was born in 1978 as a night school class at Birkdale High School and subsequently meetings were held at Southport Zoo. The search soon began for a suitable track site and one was eventually found in Victoria Park, where a five hundred foot 3.5 inch and 5 inch gauge railway track was established in 1983/84. A purpose built clubroom was built in the 1990s.

The Club now has over 90 members who range in experience from raw beginners, some of whom have never cut a piece of metal before joining the Club, to professional engineers. While the most popular projects are live steam locomotives, other interests include large scale electric locomotives, model traction engines and stationary engines.

The club enjoys excellent relations with the local council (Sefton) and following the early days has since leased additional land, which has enabled the construction of a second track one-third of a mile in length.

Three buildings adorn our site. These are: our wonderful clubroom (a modest affair if you are a golf club member but we love it), A truckstore in which we store our passenger trucks and miscellaneous other stuff and last but not least male and female toilets. The latter may be taken for granted but are the result of hard and successful negotiation on the part of our chairman.

In addition, the local Council have recently built a large public model boating pond adjacent to the track and this has proved to an equally popular facility. The pond, with its busy models moving this way and that, not to mention a few ducks, all add to the ambience of our railway.

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© Southport Model Engineering Club 2007