Our History
On the 6th June 1966, ten people expressed an interest in creating a Model Railway Club in Oxford. It was decided that they should arrive at Cowley Parish Hall, Between Towns Road, and on that day the Oxford & District Model Railway Club came into existence. It was attended by some eighteen people. Below is our history, and how the club has developed over the years.
The chairman of the club was John Peveral-Cooper who was, at the time, Oxfords Chief Engineer. Members eventually constructed two 00-gauge layouts. The club now moved from Between Towns Road where they found some space to use as a clubroom above a garage of an outfitters in James Street in the Cowley Road.
Mr Peveral-Cooper was quoted as saying, regarding modelling railways, ‘It lies in the fact that that it is something small that you can model and make work like the real thing’
Leslie Eden, another member, in fact made a layout inside a television set, a tiny N gauge battery powered tanker and put it more bluntly ‘If you like it is an obsession, if you don’t it seems utterly mad’
Some four years later in 1970, the Oxford and District Model Railway Club seemed to have come a long way and now boasted fifty members, all of which were competing for floor space to show off their layouts. They were still exhibiting at the Cowley Parish halls in Between Towns Road but had to restrict themselves to some twelve layouts. The following year, however, their enthusiasm expanded, and they were now thinking of moving to the Town Hall for their sixth annual exhibition.
In 1973, the annual exhibition was still at the Town Hall. Peter Hudson and Ron Alcock displayed an N gauge layout that they built in three months. They had seventeen layouts filling the halls. Their previous show saw attendance figures of 3,800 and they were anticipating exceeding that figure in their forthcoming show, which was by now, one of the biggest in the country.
Perhaps the most remembered layout that the Oxford and District Model Railway Club produced in those early years was Rewley Road. This represented the LMS station that once stood where the Saïd Business School now stands in St Frideswide square. The station in reality was opened in 1852 for the Oxford London and North Western Railway. The station was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton who had also built the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. The station building was dismantled and moved to the Buckinghamshire Railway Centre.
Much of the success of Rewley Road was down to the leadership and modelling of Dave Potter and Brian Garland, and a small army of other Oxford and District Model Railway Club modellers.
1990 saw yet another move for the club when it relocated to the United Reformed Church in Risinghurst near Headington Oxford. Some thirty-five years later we are still there, and the club continues to flourish.