ALL FIRED UP!
David Vaughan takes a look at this highly respected 7¼in miniature railway that has served the seaside town of Eastbourne so well and which so many families have enjoyed for nearly 30 years now. It’s still going strong despite the pandemic.
Back in the 1980s Mike Wadey was a full-time shift fireman with the East Sussex fire brigade stationed at Eastbourne, but when he was off-duty life centred round his family and his hobby of building and operating miniature steam locomotives. He was also a skilled engineer and built a 7¼in gauge diesel locomotive in his garden shed, soon acquiring a small steam locomotive which he and his family, wife Rachel, son Luke and daughter Cheryl, took to various club tracks around the country, all crammed into the back of the family Mini Countryman car.
Mike also spent time at a club miniature railway near Uckfield. He set about building a larger locomotive more suited to this line and built a 7¼in scale model of a Royal Scot 4-6-0 class engine. Scaled down it might have been, but it ended up weighing in at half a ton and was over eight feet long!
All this time Mike
