At Didcot Railway Centre we have finished our main season and have reverted to opening just at weekends.

We had a busy time in August and the recent peace and quiet has given us time to make sure everything is back in place for the autumn.

In September we hold our own annual general meeting, which of course is a chance for our Great Western Society members to have their say in the running of Didcot Railway Centre.

While doing a bit of clearing up at home I came across my old newsletters.

The September 1987 issue notes that we were in the process of computerising our records and that newsletter was the first to have the address labels printed from the computer.

We do the same thing today. One volunteer prints the labels, another sticks them on the envelopes before another team of volunteers, the Send Out Team, takes over Harwell Village Hall to stuff the envelopes and sort them so we can use the Mailsort facility to reduce our postage costs.

One of the other points noted at the 1987 AGM was that ‘construction of houses on the other side of BR’s east curve would commence shortly’, and this of course developed into Ladygrove.

It’s interesting to read about some of the other things going on. We had extended our main demonstration line to the north end of the centre and were building the locomotive works.

We had up to 24 young people from a Manpower Services Commission scheme working on our new locomotive works including preparing and laying the floor in the workshop and the new stores bay.

The summer of 1987 also saw the filming of an Inspector Morse episode when John Thaw filmed The Wolvercote Tongue on 25 August.

The newsletter also notes that we had decided to extend our opening hours and open daily between April and October in the following year and appealed for members to help with publicity.

In 1987 we were planning for our Great Western Diesel Day when we were hoping to welcome some modern diesels as well as running our own Great Western Railway Diesel Railcar No 22.

We are doing a very similar thing in 2017 when our Anything Goes Weekend on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 September will feature our modern diesels and GWR No 22.

We are planning to run our two Class 08 shunting diesels all day, running a passenger service, while GWR No 22 and our ‘Teddy Bear’ diesel No 9516 will be pulling passenger trains on our branch line.