Miniature railways and cultural microcosms: railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950 (Part 1)

Miniature railways and cultural microcosms
railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950

Part 1
On miniature tracks

Ralph Harrington
BA (Lond.), MSt (Oxon.), DPhil (Oxon.)

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I. Leisure, hobbies, and historians

In recent years, historians have been working hard on the history of leisure. What was formerly a fairly conservative sub-discipline of social history has been widened and deepened by new generation of historians concerned with such themes and topics as women’s leisure, middle-class leisure pursuits, the cultural history of leisure, the spatial and temporal dimensions of leisure activities, and the significance of leisure with regard to such issues as national identity, sexual orientation, imperialism, and the body.[1] An area of historical study which has tended to be defined in a negative way – focused on activities that are ‘not work’ – has been gradually constituted more positively and formally, and a preoccupation with the leisure pursuits of the working classes, with sport and outdoor leisure, with holidays, and with masculine leisure, approached within a conventional social history framework dominated by questions of class, employment, and income, has given way before a more varied and inclusive approach.[2]

This process has given rise to concerns in some quarters that the history of leisure is losing its identity and, perhaps, any distinctive rationale it may have possessed. ‘Do we study sport and leisure for their own sake, or for what they can tell us about the wider questions of history?’ asks Tony Collins in a 2007 review article about ‘recent trends in the history of sport and leisure’. His answer, very reasonably, is both, but he goes on to argue that ‘for the historian, sport has a wider significance (it seems to me at least) only when it acquires a wider importance than the mere playing of a game’ – thus, by the same token, non-sporting leisure pastimes have a wider significance only when they acquire a wider importance than the mere pursuit of a particular recreational activity. This argument would seem to require that a broad historical approach is taken: that ‘wider significance’, after all, may be best understood in political, social or cultural terms. Collins, however, appears to draw a more restrictive conclusion:

It remains the case today that the most interesting work published on sports and leisure history is produced by historians working with the methods of and asking the questions originally posed by social historians. And, despite a somewhat belated challenge from post-modernists working in sports studies, it is also the case that many of the questions about the history of sport that have yet to be tackled in depth by historians are those suggested by social history.[3]

The implication that social history of sport and leisure is the only alternative to a post-modern approach, and is even perhaps the only valid historical approach, sits strangely with the preceding argument that particular forms of sport and leisure must be viewed in their own particular contexts, free of the misleading generalizations produced by overarching interpretative approaches.

What is going on here is perhaps a rearguard action by social historians, conscious that what was formerly part of their intellectual domain is increasingly being occupied by cultural historians and others. One historian has gone so far as to write of the history of leisure has having become ‘collapsed into the broader category of the cultural, losing focus and momentum as a distinct speciality’, and has asserted that to regain its distinctiveness and value the historical understanding of leisure ‘must be set within an understanding of the broad cultural process and capitalism’s strategic shift to consumption’,[4] a recommendation which manages to hopelessly vague and arrogantly prescriptive at the same time. The thing about focus, as any photographer will tell you, is that it is adjustable, and the so-called loss of ‘focus’ in much recent work on the history of leisure is no such thing, but rather reflects a willingness to adjust scholarly focus to take in themes, problems and approaches that are not constrained by the rigidity of the old categories of social and cultural history for which some historians seemingly feel a certain nostalgia.[5] Increasingly, contemporary practitioners recognize that the topic of leisure is ‘truly centrifugal in its influences and manifestations’, that ‘there is not just one history of leisure’ but rather ‘a multiplicity of temporalities, histories of concatenated pleasures and practices, and narratives of variable experiences and expectations’.[6] The history of leisure is not inevitably located in the ‘strategic shifts’ of capitalism, whatever they may be, nor can leisure only be approached through its supposed dependence on the world of work, and nor must it invariably be viewed as embedded in considerations of social class relationships; and it is a great deal stronger, richer and more illuminating, and has more to offer the wider field of history, as a result.

For all the new range of topics, perspectives and approaches encompassed by recent developments in the history of leisure, however, there remains a marked tendency to concentrate on organized, collective leisure rather than individual recreational pursuits (which is partly a function of the yoking together of ‘sport’ and ‘leisure’ as assimilable categories), and on outdoor leisure activities that took people out of the home, rather than on those located indoors, within the home. A consequence of this has been that the domestic hobby – the recreational activity, often small in scale, normally pursued by an individual in the home environment – has been neglected as an object of scholarly study. If the history of leisure ‘usually occupies the margins of scholarly activity’[7] – a judgement dating from 1989 that retains much validity today, despite the recent expansion of the field – then the history of hobbies has tended to be more marginal still.

This state of affairs partly reflects the limitations of available source material: as John K. Walton and James Walvin observed in 1983, ‘It is difficult … to analyze or even describe the informal use of free time by the individual and the family outside a commercial or institutional context, especially within the home’.[8] It has to be recognized that when people went home and shut the world out so that they could pursue their private leisure interests, they effectively shut the historian out as well. Consequently, the best-documented aspects of the world of hobbies are those that took their practitioners out of their homes and into the kinds of collective and institutional frameworks of clubs, societies and competitions with which historians of leisure are, understandably, most comfortable.[9]

Furthermore, historical perspectives on the hobby have been distorted by a tendency on the part of historians to assume that in western societies the rise of leisure pursuits centred in the home is a distinctive characteristic of the modern, post-1945 era. Thus, in his Workers at Play, Stephen G. Jones has described the reinforcement of ‘home-centred leisure’ through the rise of DIY, televisions and video recorders as a distinguishing feature of the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, arguing that this phenomenon serves to mark out this period from the inter-war years (which are the focus of his study).[10] While the mass availability of the electrical/electronic technologies of home entertainment may be a feature of the post-war era (although gramophones and wireless were widespread in British homes long before 1945), this argument tends to underrate the importance of domestic leisure pursuits and hobbies in earlier periods. The development of ‘a more home-centred leisure style’[11] may have been an important characteristic of the post-war decades, reflecting the improvement in the amenities of the average home environment as well as the spread of such essentially domestic leisure technologies as television, but that does not mean that home-centred leisure was insignificant in preceding years.[12] Certainly there is evidence that leisure activities focused on the domestic sphere such as arts and crafts and collecting were widespread and well-established in the mid-nineteenth century, reflecting a more general movement towards a more domestically-centred mode of life,[13] while Jones does not discuss gardening, a domestic hobby long established across a very wide spectrum of social class which underwent great expansion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[14]

The conceptual language used by historians of leisure, beginning with the term ‘leisure’ itself, has also tended to marginalize recreational pursuits not characterized by communal activity, a degree of social organization and a tendency to happen outside the domestic environment.[15] In her analysis of women’s leisure in the mid-twentieth century, Claire Langhamer has argued that defining ‘leisure’ as a consciously chosen pattern of activity distinct from ‘work’ and assuming its dependence on group participation and a degree of regulation has had a detrimental effect on historical understanding of the available range of leisure activities, and the realities of the relationships between leisure and other aspects of daily life.[16] Langhamer’s work is exceptional and important in its recognition of the importance of the hobby (a term which is itself, as Langhamer points out, problematic with reference to female leisure[17]) and in its integration of hobbies into the wider social and cultural context of leisure.

Other historians of leisure have not, in general, shown Langhamer’s willingness to engage with the issue of the status and nature of hobbies; indeed, historical studies of leisure that pay any attention at all to the phenomenon of the hobby are thin on the ground. Ross McKibbin’s 1983 essay ‘Work and hobbies in Britain, 1880-1950’ and Steven Gelber’s Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (1999) stand out as significant contributions in this field, but both follow a different and arguably narrower and less illuminating trajectory than Langhamer. As the titles of their works show, both McKibbin and Gelber (who acknowledges the influence of McKibbin’s article on his own study) are essentially concerned with the relationship between hobbies and the world of work. Within a theoretical framework that tends to define leisure in relation to paid employment, they argue that hobbies reflect and sustain the ‘dominant ideology’ of market economy capitalism and consumerism that, with its associated structures of employment and time discipline, characterized later nineteenth- and twentieth-century western society.[18] The hobby for Gelber is theorized as the emulation of work in an idealized form, embodying ‘almost every positive element of work except human interaction’ and acting ‘as a form of perfect work’;[19] thus hobbies are distinct from work but are nonetheless entirely dependent upon the central role of work in the patterns and values they bring to life. Similarly, McKibbin frames his discussion of working-class hobbies almost exclusively in terms of their participants’ attitudes to work (whether positive or negative) and their experience and perception of the changing structure and character of non-working time.[20]

Such interpretations reflect the influence of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s theorization of leisure as an aspect of the ‘prolongation of work’, in which leisure activities, while offering an escape from work, ‘are inevitably after-images of the work process itself’.[21] Langhamer, by contrast, proposes a more inclusive conception of leisure ‘as an area of conceptual ambiguity rather than as constituting particular, pre-defined forms’.[22] She argues that the locating of ‘leisure’ activities such as hobbies solely in relation to the concept of ‘work’ and assuming a clear conceptual and temporal distinction between leisure and other types of activities is too limiting, ignoring the ambiguities and complexities inherent in the ways in which the concepts of ‘leisure’, ‘spare time’, ‘relaxation’ and activities such as ‘craft’ were – and are – perceived, valued, and pursued.[23] This is a particularly significant point with regard to women’s leisure, but it also has resonance for the study of characteristically male leisure activities, of which recreational modelling is one.

II. Reality in microcosm

Modelling as an adult leisure activity can be defined as the creation of miniature three-dimensional representations of aspects of reality for the purposes of recreation. In the contemporary world such model-making is thriving, with almost every aspect of modelling sustaining clubs and societies, an extensive literature of magazines and books, websites and other online activities, and a calendar of exhibitions and events. Furthermore, the high level of interest among modellers and collectors in old models has created a significant market for popular and antiquarian texts dealing with modelling history, at least in its artefactual dimensions.

Modelling as an aspect of human activity has, however, received very little attention from academic historians. The closest approach to a scholarly monograph on modelling is James Roy King’s Remaking the World: Modeling in Human Experience (1996), which contains some discussion of the history of modelling, but is essentially a sociology of model-making as a contemporary phenomenon.[24] The only academic article I have been able to locate that looks in depth at any historical aspect of modelling is Russell Potts’s illuminating study of Victorian model yachting,[25] which is a social history of the hobby through its institutional structures of clubs and societies rather than an examination of the hobby itself. Model-making receives a fleeting mention in Ross McKibbin’s essay on hobbies, in which he observes that making fretwork models of buildings in wood was a characteristic middle class leisure activity in the late nineteenth century, but does not explore its nature or significance beyond categorizing it as a ‘craft hobby’.[26] Steven Gelber also locates modelling among craft-based leisure activities, but conceptualizes it as essentially a degenerate form of the craft hobby. He suggests that the emergence of mass-market plastic self-assembly model kits in the mid-twentieth century epitomized the lower status of modelling as a creative and skilled leisure pursuit: such kits, while bringing modelling to a wider market and encouraging ‘crafting’ activity, ‘marked a low point in hobby crafting by reducing the productive process to the assembly of preformed parts’.[27] This is somewhat dismissive of the very real skills often involved in such modelling, but more importantly fails to engage with the cultural discourses that shape recreational model-making as an activity.

Crucially, in eliding modelling and craft hobbies, Gelber disregards the essential representational aspect of the former. In craft hobbies, the act of making is as important as – and in many cases more important than – the finished article eventually produced. In turn, that finished article is valued for what it is (a box, a pipe-rack, a table, a wall decoration) rather than because it represents something else. In modelling the finished article, rather than the skill that went into producing it, is the focus and rationale of the activity. Important though the skills employed are, they are exercised in the service of producing the model rather than for their own sake. And the finished article in modelling, the model itself, is valued for what it represents rather than what it is. As an object, a powered model of a locomotive built in brass is an intricate assembly of metal parts which is capable of movement, but as a model of a locomotive it acquires levels of meaning through representation that extend far beyond its purely artefactual qualities. A successful model of an aeroplane, a ship or a locomotive will look like the full-sized article, to the extent that a photograph of the model may even be mistaken for one that shows the real thing, entirely transcending the realities – scale, material, structure – of its actual physical nature.

'A realistic model station' - from John Davidson, Working Model Railways: How to Build and Run Them (London: Percival Marshall & Co, c.1934), p. 8.

‘A realistic model station’, from John Davidson, Working Model Railways: How to Build and Run Them (London: Percival Marshall & Co, c.1934), p. 8.

James Roy King suggests that ‘the aesthetic appeal of models can be traced to the fact that they share certain characteristics with metaphors’ and describes ‘the process of metaphoric transformation’ as ‘the most basic factor in all the models we enjoy’;[28] and resemblance or visual affinity is part of the appeal of that representational quality. The quality of representation possessed by models, however, is not simply a matter of surface resemblance. The ‘deep play’ theorization of leisure put forward by anthropologist Clifford Geertz[29] emphasizes the role of representation in leisure activities, and thus offers a useful framework for analysis of both the motivations for modelling as an individual pursuit and for an understanding of its place in its social and cultural contexts.

Geertz argues that leisure activities are, fundamentally, representational. If this is so then modelling, which is literally representational, could be seen as constituting a basic, archetypal form of leisure. Geertz argues that the symbolic and ideological aspects of this representational relationship give certain leisure activities a degree of significance far outweighing the time and resources actually devoted to them, reflecting the fact that, as modern sociologists of leisure recognize, ‘individuals do not participate in leisure, recreation, and tourist activities just for fun, passing time, playing games, and for pleasure, but also for the meanings found in these activities’.[30] Such activities work at a fundamental level of representation through both reproduction and symbolism; in doing so they apply an ordering principle[31] to reality and reflect what their practitioners believe to be important in terms of their own relationship to that reality.

Developing a theoretical context for his analysis of hobbies, Gelber draws on a ‘deep play’ interpretation of leisure activity when he makes the generalized point that leisure ‘is constituted in a way that generates and reproduces the structure of society’.[32] In the specific context of railway modelling, creating an operating miniature reproductions of full-size railway systems can indeed be seen as a classic ‘deep play’ activity. Roland Barthes suggested as much when he included trains in the list of toys which, he argued, socialized young people into accepting the conformist and authoritarian character of modern French society.[33] A ‘deep play’ reading of model railways reveals the presence of a representative relationship with reality across a range of visual, symbolic, cultural and ideological levels.

The complex multi-layered significances of the model railway reflect both the nature of the railway itself and the development over railway modelling over time. Particularly significant is the fact that historically, the reproduction of full-size railways in miniature has not been purely a leisure activity. The making of three-dimensional models has a long history as a practical part of full-scale constructional and engineering projects ranging from shipbuilding and architecture to town planning and irrigation.[34] In the case of railways, miniature reproductions of railway locomotives, vehicles and trackwork, produced for practical reasons by engineers, are as old as the full-size railway itself.[35] This practical purpose contributed a continuing didactic strand to railway modelling throughout the Victorian and Edwardian periods, paralleling the development of more clearly ‘recreational’ railway modelling in the form of toys for children and more complex models for adult leisure purposes.[36] Tennyson describes a ‘petty railway’ in the opening lines of his 1847 poem The Princess, featuring not only miniature steam trains but a working telegraph with messages flashing ‘to and fro / Between the mimic stations; so that sport / Went hand in hand with Science’.[37] In the 1870s and 80s Herbert McLeod, Professor of Experimental Science at the Royal Indian Engineering College, would take his students to Chatham naval dockyard where ‘they had a jolly time watching model railways being blown up with gun cotton’.[38] Another (and similarly destructive) use of railway models for a serious purpose can be found in Charles Dickens’s 1864 story Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy from All the Year Round, in which model trains are used to satirize the condition of the real railway system: ‘making Locomotives out of parasols broken iron pots and cotton-reels and them absolutely getting off the line and falling over the table and injuring the passengers almost equal to the originals it really is quite wonderful’.[39] This alignment of railway models with education and ‘improvement’ was an important influence on the development of railway models in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, remaining potent as one of the perceived factors which distinguished ‘model railways’ from mere ‘toy trains’.

By their very nature, railways lend themselves to this identification with serious didactic purpose. Railways, as Barthes recognized in his essay on toys in Mythologies, are intrinsically expressive of authority, hierarchy, order and control.[40] With their uniformed and hierarchically ranked staff, their highly technical character, complex procedures and regulated operation, railways create a strongly authoritarian, almost military impression and constitute an ideal subject for those whose motivation in building models is to create a version of the world ‘where one is in control’.[41] To give one potent illustration, at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s the American model railway firm Lionel marketed a model ‘international rail-launched ballistic missile’: ‘You can learn to operate these Lionel missile launchers and fire these IRBM launchers by pressing a button … and remember, kids, you’re in control’.[42] An important point here is that the railway modeller is ‘in control’ of an operating system, rather than an individual static object such as a vehicle of building. The modeller of railways goes further than the builder of model cars, ships or military vehicles in creating a working representation of an entire world, the world of the railway system (or at least a part thereof), and it is this ability of the railway modeller to recreate and exert control over a working railway network in a landscape, in a sense a miniaturization of a complete world (the ‘microcosm’ of my title) that distinguishes railway modelling from other kinds of model-making.

This is a point that Steven Gelber, in his otherwise perceptive analysis in Hobbies, misses. Gelber turns his attention to modelling in the course of his consideration of ‘handicrafts’. His approach to railway models is shaped by the terms of his overall analysis, in which ‘collecting’ hobbies are distinguished from ‘craft’ hobbies: railway modelling, he observes, ‘was defined by the acquired object more than by the process of acquiring it and at one end of the spectrum was closer to collecting than crafting’.[43] This is true up to a point, but it can be argued that it misses the central reason for the popularity – which, as Gelber observes, has always been considerable[44] – of railway modelling: the nature of the railway itself as a subject of representation. Gelber compares ships, aircraft and railways as subjects for craft hobbies and comments that in the former cases the constructed model was ‘testament to the skill of the builder, and the functional versions could stand in for their makers in head-to-head contests to determine dominance’. Model trains, however, unlike ships and aircraft, offered ‘almost no practical way to run them competitively’.[45] This is to look at the appeal of railway modelling in a way few of its adherents would have understood. A clue to the problem here is given by Gelber’s slippage of language, using the term ‘model train’ when the hobby was, and is, really about model railways.

To compare model trains with model aircraft or ships is not to compare like with like, for an aircraft or a ship is essentially a stand-alone model, while a model railway is a system in its own right, of which the train itself is only a part. The terms ‘ship modeller’ and ‘aircraft modeller’ are frequently found in modelling literature form the 1920s onwards, but their railway equivalent is not ‘train modeller’ – this term is never encountered – but ‘railway modeller’. The train, with its ability to move and mimic the operations of its full-size prototype, may constitute the central focus of railway modelling, but the fundamental appeal of the activity is the railway, the system, and its reproduction in miniature working form. In 1924 the leading model railway manufacturer Bassett-Lowke put it like this: ‘Herein lies the peculiar attraction of model railways, as compared with every other form of the modelling art. All the wide variety of railway operation may be worked out on a small scale’.[46]

It is thus misleading to describe railway modellers as ‘for the most part, consumers of someone else’s creativity’[47] when compared with those who, for example, built their own miniature ships or aeroplanes. The construction and operation of a miniature railway system, even largely using ready-made components, was itself a creative act that reflected engagement with real railway practice – and it was this above all (and certainly more than ‘head-to-head’ competition) that tended to be valued in the model railway world and has continued to drive much of the popular appeal of railway modelling through the twentieth century and beyond. Railway modelling, more than any other form of model-making, allows the modeller to recreate reality in microcosm.

Index | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

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Notes

1. For example: Selina Todd, ‘Young women, work, and leisure in interwar England’, Historical Journal, vol. 48, no. 3 (2005); John Lowerson, ‘Sport and British middle-class culture – some issues of representation and identity before 1940’, International Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 21, no. 1 (2004); James J. Nott, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Andrew Done & Richard Muir, ‘The landscape history of grouse shooting in the Yorkshire Dales’, Rural History, vol. 12, no. 2 (2001); Mike Cronin & Richard Holt, ‘The imperial game in crisis: English cricket and decolonisation’, in Stuart Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).

2. Peter Bailey, ‘Leisure, culture and the historian: reviewing the first generation of leisure historiography in Britain’, Leisure Studies, vol. 8, no. 2 (April 1989), pp. 109-22; John Lowerson, ‘Starting from your own past? The serious business of leisure history’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 36, no. 3 (2001), pp. 518, 519.

3. Tony Collins, ‘Work, rest and play: recent trends in the history of sport and leisure’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 42, no. 2 (2007), pp. 399-400.

4. Peter Bailey, ‘The politics and poetics of modern British leisure’, Rethinking History, vol. 3, no. 2 (1999), pp. 131, 159. The presence of the meaningless buzzword ‘poetics’ in the title of an academic work is usually a reliable indication of a lack of substance in what follows, and that does indeed prove to be the case here.

5. This point is convincingly argued in Linda J. Borish & Barbara L. Tischler, ‘Labour, leisure and sport in cultural perspective’, Rethinking History, vol. 5, no. 1 (2001), pp. 1-2.

6. Rudy Koshar, ‘Seeing, traveling, and consuming: an introduction’, in Rudy Koshar (ed.), Histories of Leisure (New York: Berg, 2002), pp. 3-6.

7. Lowerson, ‘Starting from your own past’, p. 517.

8. John K. Walton & James Walvin (eds.), Leisure in Britain 1780-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), p. 4.

9. Paul Johnson, ‘Conspicuous consumption and working-class culture in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. 38, no. 2 (1988); Hugh Cunningham, ‘Leisure and culture’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950 (3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

10. Stephen G. Jones, Workers at Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure 1918-1939 (London: Routledge, 1986), pp. 200-201.

11. John Rule, ‘Time, affluence and private leisure: the British working class in the 1950s and 1960s’, Labour History Review, vol. 66, no. 2 (Summer 2001), p. 224.

12. Graham Allan and Graham Crow, ‘Privatization, home-centredness and leisure’, Leisure Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (January 1991), pp. 19-21, 23-4.

13. Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 168ff; M. J. Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City: Working-Class Housing 1850-1914 (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), pp. 35, 277ff.

14. See Stephen Constantine, ‘Amateur gardening and popular recreation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Journal of Social History, vol. 14, no. 3 (Spring 1981); Miles Hadfield, A History of British Gardening (London: Hutchinson, 1960), pp. 262ff; Ruth Duthie, Florists’ Flowers and Societies (Aylesbury: Shire, 1988), pp. 25-31; John Lowerson, Sport and the English Middle Classes 1870-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), p. 13.

15. John Clarke & Chas Critcher, The Devil Makes Work: Leisure in Capitalist Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 49-51.

16. Claire Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England 1920-60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 2, 5-6, 22ff, 137-8.

17. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure, pp. 23, 138.

18. Ross McKibbin, ‘Work and hobbies in Britain, 1880-1950’, in Jay Lerner (ed.), The Working Class in Modern British History: Essays in Honour of Henry Pelling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1983), pp. 143-5; Steven M. Gelber, Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), ‘Introduction’, esp. pp. 3-6 and 10ff.

19. Gelber, Hobbies, p. 33.

20. McKibbin, ‘Work and hobbies’, pp. 128-9, 131, 136-7.

21. Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947; New York: Continuum, 1999), p. 137.

22. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure, p. 6.

23. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure, pp. 22-3, 41ff.

24. James Roy King, Remaking the World: Modeling in Human Experience (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1996).

25. Russell Potts, ‘Sporting hobbies and social class: the case of model yachting’, Journal of the History of Sport, vol. 5, no. 2 (September 1988), pp. 206-223.

26. McKibbin, ‘Work and hobbies’, p. 128.

27. Gelber, Hobbies, p. 298. This attitude, as we will see, interestingly echoes the criticisms voiced by ‘model engineers’ early in the twentieth century of the more commercial and popular aspects of the model railway hobby.

28. King, Remaking the World, p. 206.

29. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 443.

30. Mounir G. Ragheb, ‘The search for meaning in leisure pursuits: review, conceptualization and a need for a psychometric development’, Leisure Studies, vol. 15, no. 4 (September 1996), p. 246.

31. A classic exposition of this theory of the role of leisure is Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958), pp. 47-78.

32. Gelber, Hobbies, p. 11.

33. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957; 2nd edn., 1970; London: Vintage, 1993), p. 53.

34. Much contemporary modelling of this practical variety takes place in the virtual electronic environment of computers and computer networks, but this non-physical ‘virtual’ modelling is beyond the scope of this essay.

35. Jack Simmons & Gordon Biddle (eds.), The Oxford Companion to British Railway History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ‘modelling’, p. 327; Pierce Carlson, Toy Trains: A History (London: Gollancz, 1986), pp. 7-8; Gustav Reder, Clockwork, Steam and Electric: A History of Model Railways (1969; English translation, London: Ian Allan, 1972), pp. 9-15.

36. Carlson, Toy Trains, pp. 9-10; Reder, Clockwork, Steam and Electric, pp. 9-10, 15.

37. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess: A Medley (1847), in Poetical Works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1926), p. 166.

38. Hannah Gay, ‘Science and opportunity in London, 1871-85: the diary of Herbert McLeod’, History of Science, vol. xli (2003), p. 443.

39. Charles Dickens, Mrs Lirriper’s Legacy (1864), in Deborah A. Thomas (ed.), Charles Dickens: Selected Short Fiction (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 315. For more on the railway in this story, see Ralph Harrington, ‘Railway safety and railway slaughter: government, railways and public in Victorian Britain’, Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 8, no. 2 (autumn 2003), pp. 187-8; Ralph Harrington, The Neuroses of the Railway: Trains, Travel and Trauma in Britain, c.1850-c.1900 (unpub. D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1998), pp. 131-2.

40. Barthes, Mythologies, p. 53.

41. King, Remaking the World, p. 189.

42. Tom Engelhardt, The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 81. ‘IRBM’ is the abbreviation for Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile as well as, presumably, for ‘international rail-launched ballistic missile’.

43. Gelber, Hobbies, p. 233.

44. Gelber, Hobbies, p. 234

45. Gelber, Hobbies, pp. 232-3.

46. Bassett-Lowke Ltd Catalogue, 1924 edition, p. 6.

47. Gelber, Hobbies, p. 233