Solent
Notes and News
Branch Officers:
Secretary: Ted Vaughan, 7 Blackdown Close, Dibden Purlieu, Hants, SO45 5QS.
Tel: 023 8084 9533
Chairman: Mike Green.
Web Co-ordinator: Ken Wilson.
We meet each month except August, usually on the third Wednesday of the month. From September through May we meet at the Railway Institute in Eastleigh starting at 7.45 pm, and attract about 20 members and visitors. Subjects vary - we aim to cover the whole of the railway scene, and one meeting each year is usually devoted to a non-railway transport subject. Members and guests are requested to make a donation of £2 per head, to defray the costs of running these meetings. In June we gather on the platform at Eastleigh station and in July at Didcot Parkway.
We occasionally have outside visits and reports of these, as well as our indoor meetings and observation evenings, appear on a separate page on this website.
If you arrive by rail for one of our meetings you will need to turn right out of the station, cross Station Hill at a convenient point, turn left into Romsey Road, cross Upper Market Street and then use the underpass to reach the Institute: advise the doorman that you wish to attend the RCTS meeting and he should direct you to the upstairs meeting room.
By road from the Southampton direction (or from junction 5 of the M27): drive past the station, turn left into Romsey Road and left again into a small Pay and Display car park (free in the evenings), then use the same underpass. From M3, leave at junction 13: travel east on A335 for about one mile, then look out for a sign in the middle of the road pointing to the same car park. Should the car park be full, you may find space in another one reached from the same entrance, or on-street parking in Newtown Road.
To find the location of the Institute click on the location button. Move the left hand slider upwards to display street names in detail. Also you can request instructions from your location to the Institute.
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All members and visitors are very welcome.
The branch was formerly known as the South of England branch and has been in existence since the 1930s, holding indoor meetings and making visits to locations such as Southampton docks. By the late 1940s it was following regular Saturday visits to Eastleigh works with tea and meetings in the Social Hall there, as well as arranging occasional visits to other places of railway interest and carrying out lineside observations on Saturdays in August.
Following the end of steam and the consequent reorganisation of Eastleigh works, meetings moved to the new Railway Institute and, in 1989, changed from Saturdays to Tuesday evenings. For some years now, we have met jointly with the Southampton and Waterside branch of the Mid Hants Railway Society and the Hampshire group of the Somerset & Dorset Railway Trust. We decided at the branch AGM in January 2007 to adopt the title Solent branch, as that more accurately describes the area from which we draw most of the people who attend our meetings than the somewhat all-embracing South of England branch.