L-R: Eelco de Bode; Xavier Jiménez; Pep Alemany; Martin Johnson; Nigel Barnes (kneeling); Chris Newman; Chris Parmenter; Andrew Hartland; William Powell; Graham Shirley (kneeling); Terry McMenamin; Jamie Keyte; Hendrik Kaptein; John Hind (kneeling); Alex Powell; Paul Middleton (kneeling); Owen Jordan; Bob Gwynne.
Absent: David Pawson, Richard Coleby and Ian Foot (wh kindly took the photo).
The twenty members (listed above) attended another successful ASTT conference on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway over the weekend of Oct 3rd-4th. There were five excellent presentations at the Saturday session that was held in the NYMR’s Pickering Learning Centre, followed by a conference dinner at the Forest & Vale Hotel. On the Sunday morning, most attendees lined up at the ticket office in Pickering to buy tickets for the 9:30 train to Grosmont, which was hauled by 4079 Pendennis Castle which had been brought up from Didcit for the NYMR’s autumn gala the previous weekend.
In Grosmont loco depot, Paul Middleton (NYMR’s locomotive superintendent – aka “Piglet”) updated his 2025 talk on the installation of oil-firing to Peter Pest’s S160 2-8-0 No 2253 “Omaha” which was completed earlier in 2026. In the afternoon, Paul showed us over the locomotive when he demonstrated, two or three times, the procedure for lighting-up the firing system.
The only disappointment was the return to Pickering on the 14:55 train, which was hauled by a Class 37 diesel!
A list of the presentations and their accompanying PPT files will shortly be made available to members on a separate Conference page.