Miniature railways and cultural microcosms: railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950 (Part 3)

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

Part 3
Model modernity and nostalgia

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

copyright notice | citation information | plagiarism | notes

V. Railway realism and model modernities

Even as it developed, the aesthetic associated with ‘popular’ railway modelling was itself contestable. The guiding principle was always held to be ‘realism’, but the precise content and determinants of that concept were open to debate. Clearly ‘realism’ involved the reproduction of reality in some form, a form necessarily selective. Selecting those aspects of the real railway which could be viewed as constituting its essence and transferring them to the miniature realm of the model railway was a subjective and imprecise art. Visual realism did not necessarily equate to operational realism, with individual modellers holding differing views on which was the more important, but it was widely believed that the successful model railway achieved a balance between these two characters. Through the model railway press, the view emerged that if the visual aesthetic of the railway and its operational rationale were sufficiently thought through and existed in balance with each other than ‘realism’ would be maintained. That quality of realism would be, as it were, immanent in the relationship between the railway and its installations and operation, and the surrounding setting.

The ideal: scenic setting and railway in balance. From Edward W. Hobbs, Model Electric Railway Making (London: Cassell, 1934), p. 5.

The ability of modellers using electric motive power and working in the smaller scales to create a complete landscape held its own dangers. A visually convincing slice of landscape, however carefully modelled and intricately detailed, could not be taken seriously as a model railway if the railway itself was not planned and laid out according to recognized standards of realism. A train running round to no purpose in a miniature setting, no matter how beautiful that setting, was no more than a toy. There was also the temptation to cram too much into a small layout in an attempt to reproduce every aspect of the full-size railway, resulting in tangles of twisting track and stations every few inches. The model railway press cautioned against these dangers and urged the importance of balance and planning. ‘What is the object and aim of your model railway system?’ asked the Model Railway Constructor in 1935, ‘Is it a meaningless jumble of “runs,” with numerous stations and sharp curves, the like of which has never been seen on a real railway?’[1] The realistic railway had to achieve not only a visual but an operational resemblance to the original, appearing to have a reason for its existence and believable work to do within its miniaturized world. Accordingly, the Model Railway News and Model Railway Constructor encouraged their readers to conceive and plan their layouts according to the factors influencing the form taken by the full-size railway. Too often, Model Railway News argued, modellers began with a prescribed space and created a track plan that would fill it with as many railway features as possible. Such a layout was ‘bound to be of nondescript character’, for ‘it is not based on any particular service requirements, it bears no relation to geographical or countryside difficulties, it carries no well defined passenger and goods traffic, and it resembles no known prototype’. To avoid such incoherence the modeller should follow the practices of the full-size railway, creating a miniature network around realistically conceived demographic, economic and topographical conditions. The modeller whose aim was ‘realism’ should plan his fictional railway system around ‘certain prescribed residential and industrial districts’ and provide appropriate forms of goods and passenger service ‘to the inhabitants of the imaginary countryside’, or should take the plan of his layout from a stretch of real railway so that it will ‘of necessity be governed by the corresponding scheme of the prototype’. In this way the modeller would ‘produce a real railway model instead of a toy model railway’.[2]

Such exhortations are typical of the ever-stronger emphasis of the inter-war model railway press on the reproduction of the working railway system, and increasingly of the railway system in the miniature landscape. As part of this movement the relationship between the model railway and the model landscape became a significant debating point among the modelling fraternity. In January 1926 a writer in the Model Railway News, in an article titled ‘Too much model railway?’, suggested that too many model railways were ‘failing in realism’ because they were ‘all railway, points and sidings in every corner’ and argued that ‘roads, fields, typical buildings and a general “landscape” effect is desirable and will certainly give a more realistic appearance than a mere collection of model railway components grouped together’.[3]

Too much model railway? A corner of a 1930s 00-gauge railway. From Edward Beal, Scale Railway Modelling To-day (London: Macmillan, 1939), p. 57.

More than a decade later the correct balance between landscape setting and railway remained a matter of debate, but it was clear that, at least for the indoor electric railway, the notion of the railway in the landscape with a balance between the two was the new orthodoxy. In his influential 1937 handbook on the smaller gauges E. W. Twining criticized modellers who, when building layouts or just producing track plans for model railway magazines, seemed to believe ‘that to make the most complete system it is necessary to pack into a given space as many things as can be thought of’.[4] From the beginnings of his railway modelling career in the Edwardian years, Twining had always argued for a more ‘scenic’ approach to model railways.[5] In the 1900s he had been unusual among the model engineers in calling for more ‘landscape and scenic effects’ and criticizing modellers who were satisfied with nothing more than a bare track upon which their locomotives could be run,[6]but by the 1930s he was articulating the view of the modelling mainstream and, importantly, of the railway modelling industry (of which as a manufacturer himself he was a part) that supplied the ready-made accessories on which so many railway modellers depended. Yet the products of that industry were themselves part of the danger, tempting the modeller to purchased buildings, cranes, sheds, coaling plants, stations and tunnels and scatter them indiscriminately in every corner of the layout. Not only did this lead to unrealistic and unattractive clutter, it also led modellers to disregard the other elements of the landscape that were needed to achieve the balance that was essential to realism. ‘Far too many owners of model railway systems’, complained Jerome Little in Model Railway Working (1944), ‘are content … to build stations, goods depots, signal boxes, etc., and leave it at that. Realism cannot be obtained in this way’.[7]

Twining’s aversion to cluttered layouts stems not only from his concern with ‘realism’ but is informed by his commitment to what he calls ‘picturesqueness’. Not only does he disapprove of model railway landscapes being cluttered, he warns against cluttering them with the wrong things – by which he means representations of urban-industrial development.

The author can see nothing beautiful about models of collieries, grain elevators, docks, cranes, roadways with tram-cars etc., and in sort, everything imaginable of an industrial nature … It is, therefore, advocated that the railway enthusiast should concentrate on his railway and not be distracted by other forms of industry. In other words, make the railway picturesque and reproduce nature rather than works or factories.[8]

Such pastoral nostalgia was not typical of railway modelling during the inter-war years; only after the Second World War did it become more widespread among railway modellers. Indeed, a notable characteristic of railway modelling during the inter-war years it its lack of nostalgia and its commitment to modernity. This was reflected in the aesthetic of the landscape model railway; there is no necessary contradiction between the rural character of most model railway landscapes and the desire of most modellers to reflect and represent the modern in their modelling. Twining himself expressed a ‘liking for old engines’ and related their appeal to ‘a liking for old things; old furniture, old glass, armour, old churches and old castles … through them we try to recapture the spirit of a past age’.[9] The same nostalgia seems to be at work in his favouring of pastoral landscapes over urban and industrial settings. Yet he also recommended the most modern styles to modellers seeking to build their own railway stations and other buildings use the modern style, ‘the style which has become the vogue in the last 20 years or so, in which no trace of any older style is introduced’.[10] This was partly on the grounds of it being easiest for the modeller to reproduce in miniature form, but Twining’s personal favouring of the modern style is clear from his own commercially available designs for station buildings, available through Trix Twin under the ‘Many-Ways’ name. The ‘Many-Ways’ system offered the modeller a modular system of buildings suitable for stations and other railway buildings, adaptable to particular settings and circumstances. The style of the buildings was severely modern, being derived from the concrete stations being constructed by the Southern Railway in suburban London and the south-east.[11] Modellers who wished to criticize the handiwork of those whose approach they found wanting, whether they spoke as live steam advocates rejecting electric power or as builders of large-scale locomotive models expressing hostility to smaller gauges, were always very ready to use the damning label ‘toy trains’. Many issues were bound up in the toys/models opposition, ranging from the necessity for true scale models to the role of scenery in a model railway, but it was the question of motive power – what made the miniature trains run – which became the key issue for many participants in this debate. Trix Twin railway buildings in ‘ultra-modern’ style were picked out (and illustrated) in an article on model railways in the Modern Boy’s Book of Hobbies in 1937 as epitomizing a desirable appearance of modernity: ‘The stations and other buildings are as modern in appearance as the trains are in conception’.[12]

Twining’s favouring of contemporary station design reflects the prevailing attitude of the railway modelling press between the wars, that modellers should seek to represent the best of the modern railway. Indeed, the Model Railway News argued that one role of model railways, at a time when the full-size railway system was feeling the effects of competition from other transport modes and general economic hardship, was to act as a form of propaganda for the real thing:

The need of the railways for popular favour emphasises the importance of the publicity work done by the model railway clubs, and by model railway enthusiasts generally. Model railway men are all the time attracting public attention to improved types of locomotives and rolling stock by their beautifully-made models, they are arousing interest in railway operation by the demonstration of their model railways.[13]

The Model Railway News itself certainly strove to publicize the efforts of the full-size railways to develop and modernize, dutifully reporting timetable improvements, the introduction of new technologies and operational innovations. ‘The general tendency of the railway companies to speed up their services’ was noted in 1932, and such technological advances as ‘A new L.M.S. Heavy Oil Shunting Locomotive’ and ‘A New Mechanical Coaling Plant’ were described in detail in the journal’s pages.[14] For their part, model railway suppliers took it for granted that modellers would wish to keep up to date with the latest developments on the full-size railway. When the railway companies were consolidated into four large regional groupings in 1923, the Bassett-Lowke company’s catalogue observed that the grouping would have ‘a vital influence on the future of railway modelling’, and announced that Bassett-Lowke’s policy with regard to supplying locomotives and vehicles in the liveries of the old companies ‘must be governed largely by the same conditions as those with which the directorates of the grouped railways have had to contend’, so that stocks of the old liveries would still be available but would gradually be run down as ‘we are progressing as rapidly as is practicable in the turning out also of engines and rolling stock in the new group liveries’.[15]

Bassett-Lowke electric 4-4-0 locomotive 'Duke of York' 11/4in gauge (0 scale), 1928. The price was 36/-. From Model Railway News, vol. 4, no. 37 (January 1928), p. vi.

Bassett-Lowke electric 4-4-0 locomotive 'Duke of York' 1¼in gauge (0 scale), 1928. The price was 36/-. From Model Railway News, vol. 4, no. 37 (January 1928), p. vi.

Against this background it was natural that modellers would be encouraged to reflect contemporary developments not only in the trains they ran and the liveries they applied to locomotives and rolling stock, but in their buildings and other structures as well. The architectural style of station buildings, goods sheds and signal boxes became a touchstone of contemporaneity. ‘On many model railways the track and rolling stock are excellent’, observed the Model Railway News in 1931, ‘but the architectural features are very poor’. Good architectural features, the journal argued, ‘can add very much to the dignity of purpose of a model, and, when present, may help materially in counteracting the impression that the model is only a toy’.[16] The message is clear: ‘dignity of purpose’ could and should be found in a model, it would certainly never be found in a toy. Furthermore, given the claim that ‘British railways do not shine in the architectural qualities of their terminal or important station buildings’, railway modellers, by making use of modern architectural idioms in their miniature buildings, could point the way for the real railways: ‘Here is an opportunity for model railway owners to give a lead to the railways at home’.[17] The railway system as the modeller represented should be modern and progressive, free from the shabbiness and mess of obsolete buildings and decrepit installations. ‘The model railway man of to-day who wishes to be up-to-date must be an architect as well as an engineer’, declared the Model Railway News in 1932. Observing of the real railway that ‘If the buildings are antiquated, the public cannot be blamed for feeling that the railway itself is antiquated and unprogressive’, the journal urged modellers to ensure that the ‘model railway lay-out [keeps] pace with modern thought in its architectural aspects, and so maintain in its miniature way the spirit of railway progress’.[18] In the final months of the Second World War, with the real war-weary railways shabbier and more run-down than ever, Model Railway News was still urging modellers to accentuate the positive and look to the ever-bright future: as the full-size railways ‘develop and expand, so will our policy follow suit in order that the greatest of all hobbies should not lag behind’, declared an editorial in May 1945. In particular, the journal anticipated the increased importance of the aeroplane in the post-war world and drew attention to the ‘further development of railway aviation’, suggesting that ‘the future model railway of any size will scarcely be complete without its aerodrome’.[19]

VI. Steam, diesel, and the old-time railway

There were limits, however, to the acceptance of modernity in the model railway world, particularly in the realm of motive power. Modellers may have overwhelmingly accepted, and indeed welcomed, the ascendancy of electricity in the model railway hobby, but their attachment to the full-size steam locomotive remained tenaciously strong. Celebrating the world of the contemporary railway, and reproducing it faithfully in model form, presented no great difficulties when that world was still dominated by steam motive power, but the possibility that the abandonment of steam would be the price of progress on the railways placed many modellers in a dilemma. The post-war years would provide an answer to that dilemma for much of the modelling fraternity in the form of a recourse to nostalgia and conscious celebration of the past, but during the inter-war years the attachment to the progressive present remained strongly rooted among modellers.

‘Why run models of old locos?’ asked a reader’s letter in the Model Railway News in April 1932. ‘Why run models of the locomotives of yesterday? … We must look ahead as well as looking backward’.[20] However, the locomotives of today, like the locomotives of yesterday, were steam locomotives. For the overwhelming majority of modellers, modern motive power meant steam motive power, and the issue of steam’s replacement by diesel and electric traction was a controversial one. The Model Railway News wondered in an editorial in 1931 ‘what would be the effect on the model railway of steam were to disappear completely … Is there not … a secret regard for the handsome and impressive outline of the steam outline locomotive which everybody would be sorry to lose?’[21] As long as steam held its place as the dominant form of motive power on British railways, a place reinforced by cultural and technological conservatism, there was no direct contradiction between a belief in railway modernity and an allegiance to steam. In 1939 Edward Beal observed that the diesel locomotive had not yet ‘enjoyed any extensive measure of popularity with the railway modeller’ and that there appeared to be ‘some innate prejudice against anything other than the locomotive of “steam outline”’. He contrasted this situation with that in North America, where ‘this prejudice has largely been lived down, probably because the ultra-modern type of non-steam train has been so widely adopted by the leading railway companies’.[22] Diesel and electric traction were not widely encountered on the full-size railway in Britain and, where they were thought about at all by modellers, were felt to lack the visual, sensual appeal of the steam locomotive with its accompaniments of fire, smoke and glittering brasswork. In Britain the steam locomotive was seen as the ‘natural’ form of motive power, with the largely unfamiliar world of diesel and electric traction being disregarded by modellers and the model railway industry until the accelerated pace of railway modernization after the Second World War forced them to take account of it. Between the wars an ambivalent attitude to technological change left modellers committed to keeping up with the real railway and reflecting the latest developments, but unwilling, on essentially aesthetic and emotional grounds, to abandon the familiar steam-dominated railway world that was all they had ever known.

The changes that affected the real world of railways after the Second World War – nationalization, modernization, rationalization – had an important influence on attitudes to the railways’ past. Railway preservation expanded significantly, and what is now known as the ‘heritage’ railway sector became established.[23] A similar effect was felt in the model railway hobby, which simultaneously entered a new period of expansion and optimism after the restrictions and difficulties of the wartime years (although post-war austerity, particularly restrictions on the availability of raw materials, continued to have a marked effect), and an age of uncertainty characterized by constant change, both actual and threatened, in the world of the prototype. Celebration of the steam-age railway and nostalgic re-creations of rural English branch lines, above all those of the Great Western Railway, became symptomatic of a rejection of contemporary values and a reversion, in miniature form at least, to an imagined bucolic past.

Pastoral nostalgia: a Great Western branch line model, 1950. From Model Railway News, vol. 26, no. 301 (January 1950), p. 9.

Ruminating in 1947 on the increasing interest among modellers in running ‘period’ railways, Gilbert Thomas articulated the prevailing mood of conservatism with his observation that ‘to live imaginatively in the past is to be immune from the uncertainties of the ever-changing present! That they can keep the past alive is another virtue of models’.[24] Thomas’s own model railway, which he had begun to build during the inter-war years, recreated the Great Western Railway as he had known it, and, as the nationalization of the railways and the end of the real Great Western loomed, he asserted his determination to ensure that in miniature form at least the GWR would continue unchanging:

… when I look at my models of the locomotives King George V, Pendennis Castle and Llanwair Grange, I appreciate that there is, after all, much to be said for the present! How long, in this era of upheaval, the ‘present’ will remain the present is, of course, another matter! The early future threatens or promises – the reader, according to his own political or other views, may choose which of the two verbs he prefers! – to bring more sweeping changes to our railways. If these changes should ever materialise – bringing, from the aesthetic and sentimental points of view, a dull uniformity, whatever might be the possible merits on other counts – then indeed our model railway would become a ‘period’ one. The real Great Western (sad thought!) might lose its own individuality; but the chocolate and cream coaches and the G.W. locomotives of today would continue, by unanimous agreement among ourselves, to grace our line!.[25]

A similar attitude can be fund in the post-war writings of Edward Beal, who in his Scale Railway Modelling To-day of 1939 had written of a ‘prejudice’ among modellers against diesel locomotives. In 1955 he published a far more conservative railway modelling handbook under the explicitly nostalgic title Modelling the Old-Time Railways. This later book was concerned with the modelling of the railways of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras – the period E. W. Twining had celebrated in 1937 as producing locomotives that ‘for pure beauty of outline, finish and painting … were unsurpassed’.[26] Beal, like Twining, had during the inter-war years seen an interest in modelling the earlier period as a minority phenomenon, but since the war things had changed, and it was the modernization of the railways – and particularly the displacement of steam power by diesel and electric – that lay behind that change. In the introduction to Modelling the Old-Time Railways he observed that ‘interest in this branch of railway modelling has vastly increased with the passing away, or threatened eclipse, of the supremacy of steam power on the railways’. The prospect of steam disappearing from the railway system, he continued, ‘brings a certain gloom to the heart of the enthusiast and prompts him to turn again to those former times with an emotion reluctant to be quelled.[27]

The theme of turning one’s back on the contemporary scene and finding refuge in the stability of earlier times is explicit through the book, and the values of conservatism and nostalgia are never far from the surface. Beal begins, however, by observing that ‘if a young person were asked to identify the golden age of railways he would immediately give the palm to the present hour’ on the grounds of its ‘wealth of invention’ and ‘development of power and speed’, and the engineering progress exemplified in more powerful locomotives and more effective signalling and control systems’.[28] All this, though, is to make the point that for Beal the argument for modelling the ‘old-time’ railways is not to do with such practical issues as technological progress. It is based instead on ‘the standpoint of modelling and aesthetic appeal’.[29] Using modelling to preserve and celebrate these aesthetic values into a new age does not necessarily mean a rejection of progress per se – indeed, Beal is critical of any suggestion that in quest of this ‘golden age’, modellers should ‘go right back to the beginnings, to the age of the Rocket and the Sanspareil’, for this would be to reject the values which railway modelling should always embody: the ideology of technological progress. Those early days of the railway were:

altogether too elementary, too crudely experimental, too innocent of the finesse and the flourish of demonstrated accomplishment. To be sure, it was an age not without its prophecies and amusements, but it was embryonic, and like all such things it was unlovely.[30]

For Beal the ‘most outstanding hour of railway history’ was the late Victorian and Edwardian period: ‘Take a section of the years between 1890 and 1914 and you have, I venture to say, definitely this paramount hour’. The phrase ‘paramount hour’ suggests both the ascent to that highest point and a subsequent fall, but Beal interprets that fall as being the result of the unstoppable working of the laws of progress, and, as is hymning of the modern railway’s technological marvels has already made clear, it is a fall in some things, not in all. Those days of unparalleled aesthetic splendour, he writes, ‘were days which, by their very nature, and subject to the harsh laws of progress, were bound to pass’.[31]

The celebration of this golden age in model form is thus, Beal frankly acknowledges, an irrational act, based not on the unarguable realities of technological improvement but on subjective aesthetic, emotional, even moral perceptions. This point is made still clearer when he sets the Victorian and Edwardian railway in its social and political context. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century railway for Beal was not a place of harsh working conditions, long hours, strikes and ill-feeling between companies and workers. Railway workers, he writes, ‘were proud of the men who employed them’,[32] and the atmosphere of the age was one of ‘optimism and tranquillity whose men and women enjoyed life with a certain peculiar dignity’.[33] The environment itself was an unspoilt, if threatened, rural idyll: ‘Even the unsullied countryside itself surely wore a fast-departing charm’ revealing ‘little if anything of modern mechanisation’.[34] That landscape itself embodied time-honoured landmarks which were also signifiers of social stability :‘the village green with its [35]horse pond and country inn, the old parish church in the immediate vicinity … To reproduce these rural pictures in the shape of models is a pleasant task indeed’. The railway companies of this era were characterized by ‘individuality’ and ‘a fascinating diversity of detail and design’ very different from the uniformity of the modern age. They flourished in a beneficent atmosphere of laissez-faire and free enterprise, before the ‘devastation which came for the railway enthusiast’ with grouping, nationalization, and the ‘eliminations, abandonments and closures which have followed’.[36]

The post-war period, it can be argued, is thus marked out from the inter-war years by an uncoupling of ‘realism’ from ‘modernity’, and an increasingly evident attachment to pastoral escapism and nostalgia among railway modellers. For the ‘model engineers’ of the early twentieth century, constructing their own equipment and systems produced, arguably, a natural commitment to technical progress as a form of modernity; for ‘railway modellers’ dependent on a large consumer industry mass-producing and distributing ready-made locomotives, vehicles and other components, no such association existed. Meanwhile the many changes undergone by the railway system after the Second World War broke the link between celebrating the railway itself and celebrating ‘progress’ on the railway. As the character of the full-sized railway became increasingly unappealing to many modellers, so they turned their backs on it, to fix their eyes instead upon a lovingly re-imagined railway golden age.

Index | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

© Ralph Harrington 2008. This work is protected by copyright and is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Licence. This means that you can copy, distribute and transmit this work freely as long as it is attributed to the original author; you may not alter, transform or build upon this work; and you may not use this work for commercial purposes.

Citation information for this essay
Please note that proper attribution is required by the licence conditions pertaining to this work, as well as being good scholarly practice.
Cite as: Ralph Harrington, ‘Miniature railways and cultural microcosms: railway modelling in Britain, c.1900-c.1950. Part 3: Modernity and nostalgia’ (2008)
Location (stable URL): http://www.greycat.org/papers/modrlys3.htm

A note on plagiarism
Whatever you do with this essay, do it as far as possible in your words, not in mine, and where you do use my words, acknowledge them as mine. Not to do so is to risk committing plagiarism.

Contact the author.

Notes

1. Model Railway Constructor, vol. 2, no. 4 (June 1935), p. 80.

2. Model Railway News, vol. 7, no. 75 (March 1931), p. 65.

3. Model Railway News, vol. 2, no. 1 (January 1926), p. 9.

4. E. W. Twining, Indoor Model Railways: H0 and 00 Gauges (London: Newnes, 1937), p. 100.

5. See E. W. Twining, ‘Picturesqueness in model railways’, The Model Engineer, vol. 13 (1905), no. 227, p. 202; no. 229, p. 249; no. 231, p. 298.

6. Stan Buck, E. W. Twining: Model Maker, Artist and Engineer (Ashbourne: Landmark Publishing, 2004), p. 31.

7. Jerome B. Little, Model Railway Working (London: Vawser & Wiles, 1944), p. 40.

8. Twining, Indoor Model Railways, p. 100.

9. Twining, Indoor Model Railways, p. 24.

10. Twining, Indoor Model Railways, p. 136..

11. Twining, Indoor Model Railways, pp. 147-8.

12. Modern Boy’s Book of Hobbies (London: Amalgamated Press, 1937), pp. 88, 91.

13. Model Railway News, vol. 8, no. 85 (January 1932), pp. 1-2.

14. Model Railway News, vol. 8, no. 91 (July 1932), p. 169, vol. 9, no. 97 (January 1933), p. 19, and no. 98 (February 1933), p. 23.

15. Bassett-Lowke Ltd, 1924 model railway catalogue, pp. 11, 12. Under the Railways Act of 1921 the many railway companies inherited from the Victorian and Edwardian periods were grouped into four large geographically-based companies. The grouping took effect on 1 January 1923.

16. Model Railway News, vol. 7, no. 75 (March 1931), p. 66.

17. Model Railway News, vol. 7, no. 75 (March 1931), p. 66.

18. Model Railway News, vol. 8, no. 88 (April 1932), p. 86.

19. Model Railway News, vol. 21, no. 245 (May 1945), p. 85.

20. Model Railway News, vol. 8, no. 88 (April 1932), pp. 109-10.

21. Model Railway News, vol. 7, no. 73 (January 1931), p. 2.

22. Edward Beal, Scale Railway Modelling To-day (London: A. & C. Black, 1939), p. 155.

23. Richard Sykes, Alastair Austin, Mark Fuller, Taki Kinoshita & Andrew Shrimpton, ‘Steam attraction: railways in Britain’s national heritage’, Journal of Transport History, 3rd ser., vol. 18, no. 2 (September 1997), pp. 158-9, 167-8. See also Rob Shorland-Ball, ‘The British experience: railway preservation in the UK’, in idem (ed.), Common Roots – Separate Branches: Railway History and Preservation (London: National Museum of Science & Industry, 1994).

24. Gilbert Thomas, Paddington to Seagood: The Story of a Model Railway (London: Chapman & Hall, 1947), p. 86.

25. Thomas, Paddington to Seagood, pp. 86-7. The ratio of exclamation marks to conventional punctuation in this passage is entirely representative of Thomas’s writing style. A little of it, you may well imagine, goes a long way.

26. Twining, Indoor Model Railways, p. 24.

27. Edward Beal, Modelling the Old-Time Railways (London: A. & C. Black, 1955), p. vii.

28. Beal, Old-Time Railways, pp. 1-2.

29. Beal, Old-Time Railways, p. 2.

30. Beal, Old-Time Railways, p. 2.

31. Beal, Old-Time Railways, p. 2.

32. Beal, Old-Time Railways, p. 2.

33. Beal, Old-Time Railways, p. 6.

34. Beal, Old-Time Railways, pp. 4, 7.

35. Beal, Old-Time Railways, p. 11.

36. Beal, Old-Time Railways, p. 5.