May - June 2024

Engineering Progress

All being well we expect the movement of our chassis inside the Tyseley main workshop to happen on Monday 8^th July.

Further regular volunteer sessions have taken place in June and July at Tyseley.  These concentrated on cleaning, polishing and some painting of a range of parts including various housings, expansion links, brake hanger brackets, motion components and tender axles. We have been allocated plenty of space in the new carriage shed for this purpose.

More expressions of interest have been received recently about volunteering at Tyseley, which is most encouraging.

Work on the boiler at HBSS in May saw the start of Phase 2 of the current work packages - finishing the foundation ring and starting the fitment of the longitudinal stays.

Members Day at Tyseley – Saturday 21^st September 2024

Detailed planning is under way with our Tyseley colleagues for our first Members Day in 5 years. 

Finance 

Great news on the money front - our funds increased by nearly £80,000 in a matter of days . How did this happen? First, we received a very welcome and unexpected new company sponsorship of £50,000 on 31st May.

Next, over £14,000 was credited to our account by HMRC (Charities) on 30th May, more than doubling our estimated £6,000 Gift Aid claim. We had spotted an anomaly in our financial programme in respect of Gift Aid calculations, and carried out a complete detailed review, with this result.

Then an individual donation of £5,000 was received on 3rd June; closely followed by a further £10,000 company sponsorship.  

Sales

June presented us with a challenge, which was to attend two events on the same weekend – Swanage, which was a three-day show and Statfold, a two-day show. We worked on the Wednesday before preparing two lots of show merchandise, we also took the opportunity to trial a members’ sales section at the Statfold show. The ‘Strictly Bulleid’ event at Swanage grossed around £2,000 for us and brought two new members – well worth the trip south: although we were deep in Southern ‘territory’ there was much interest shown in our project. 

We continue to receive donations which are so important to our project, but as ever, the more the better. Railway models of all gauges are what we can use, so please see if you can help us by donating your unwanted model stock.