My file looked a little different than the order of lines you presented above.

Almost everything was identical, except:
location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}

I changed mine to what you suggested:
location / {
try_files \$uri \$uri/ =404;
}

to be safe I just rebooted the RPi.

The web service fails to start completely now.
nginx shows running, but nothing on the page loads correctly.

I removed the backslashes and restarted nginx using “service nginx restart”

Things working again.
Here is the file, please let me know what needs modifying:

///

server{
listen 127.0.0.1:80;
server_name 127.0.0.1;
access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

client_max_body_size 25M;
client_body_buffer_size 128k;

root /var/www/openrepeater;
index index.php;

location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
}

# Disable viewing .htaccess & .htpassword & .db
location ~ .htaccess {
deny all;
}
location ~ .htpassword {
deny all;
}
location ~^.+.(db)$ {
deny all;
}
}
server{
listen 443;
listen [::]:443 default_server ipv6only=on;

include snippets/snakeoil.conf;
ssl on;

root /var/www/openrepeater;

index index.php;

server_name openrepeater;

location / {
try_files $uri $uri/ / =404;
}

access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

location ~ \.php$ {
include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME /var/www/openrepeater/$fastcgi_script_name;
}

# Disable viewing .htaccess & .htpassword & .db
location ~ .htaccess {
deny all;
}
location ~ .htpassword {
deny all;
}
location ~^.+.(db)$ {
deny all;
}
}

///

Thanks!
73
Joe N8CN