By Simon Gates
When I was little my Gran and Grandad use to take me to Vivary Park to feed the ducks and see the model engines. When the club started building the line at Creech St Michael, me and my dad used to stop off from our cycle ride on Sunday mornings to see how things were going. I had my first ride at Creech on Tony Gosling’s ‘Mack’. At this point the track was just short of where the first set of points for the loop are placed.

I had my first driving experience at the grand opening. I looked out of my bedroom one afternoon and saw that the car park was full, which apart from football matches, as far as I know had not happened before. I then walked across the fields and up to the railway and saw three engines trundling around the track. I spent the rest of the afternoon riding up and down on the track on Tony Newberry’s GW locomotive & Tony Gosling’s ‘Duke of Wellington’ I had two tickets left and Tony’s son Steve was driving the ‘Duke’. Tony leaned over the fence and said “let this young man have a go at driving in a minute”. We returned to the station and Steve explained the controls to me and, just as Steve got on the coach behind me, Mike looked at me and said “you have to have two tickets to be able to drive”. I put my hand in my pocket & pulled out two tickets. Mike just laughed.

I’ve now been a junior member of Taunton Model Engineers since early 2006 and I love every minute of it! I go up to the railway nearly every Sunday and to the club meetings. Sometimes they even trust me enough to drive the engines!

Two of my best friends have now also joined the club. George Hawkins & Rikky Duke come up as much as they can to help out. When we are all up at Creech together, we joke and call ourselves the Junior Division.

I’ve made lots of friends at the Club - John Ross (aka Rambo) Tony Gosling & Andy Cooke. They have all been really helpful and are teaching me lots about steam.

I am looking forward to many more experiences with the club and shall hopefully learn much more about steam locomotives and the uses of machinery as a whole.