Members Monthly Bulletin - November 2020

At West Shed, work has continued since the latest Covid-19 lockdown. Good progress has been made on the lubrication system; and the time-consuming machining of small but important components such as the valve chest drains has been completed . We have finally completed the transfer of various components from Crewe Heritage Centre, selling our container there to CHC and delivering a second one for West Shed.

On the driving wheel weld repairs, the trailing axle (which had proved impossible to remove from the wheels) has now been cut up and removed at Riley and Son (Bury), to allow the wheel weld repair to proceed. A new axle is being provided. At the time of writing, work on the axles is paused pending clarification of technical specification detail for re-fitting the wheelsets.

With the reverser shaft now returned to West Shed from Roach Engineering, assessment has pointed to detailed engineering design and manufacture issues. We have decided to trial fit the reverser shaft to the chassis, to support our work on the engineering options.

Work on the boiler stays at HBSS continues.

On Finance, we have been advised that our bank is increasing charges quite substantially from January 2021. The largest increase is when we pay cheques in. It is free for up to 20 cheques per calendar month but anything over 20 incurs a charge of 60p per cheque on the total number. For example, if 21 cheques were paid in the charge would be £12.60.  So could I please ask you to consider alternative ways to contribute?

Any online interbank transfer is free, but there is a charge for other services.  Our website uses PayPal to process transactions and there is a small variable charge based on the member’s/donor’s’ type of payment used.

Card payments have been available on our sales stand for some time but can also be taken over the telephone. We use SumUp to process these and their charges vary but are 1.69% for card readers and 2.95% for telephone payments.

For those members using Amazon Smile online, the donation from them for the quarter ended 30^thSeptember was £25.33 - so keep smiling!!

We’re delighted to report that our corporate sponsor has decided to continue supporting us to the tune of £5,000 per month at least for a further year.

Thank you for your continuing support for our sales efforts: online and mail order sales are holding up very well.  There are two new designs of face masks available from our web shop - what better way, in these straitened times to help fight the pandemic than by buying them as stocking-fillers for family and friends!

There will be a detailed update in the forthcoming Warrior – see below.

The latest issue of The Warrior is being prepared for mailing by Linda and David Westerman (working from home) so you should receive your copy by the weekend of 5th/6th December. As well as comprehensive financial and engineering round-ups there are a couple of articles about the return of the Unknown Warrior to these shores and a wonderful article and collection of pictures in Members' Corner inspired by the Hest Bank painting featured in issue 46.