Modelling Lives
Tales from the miniature world.
Historian Charles Insley talks about his passion for modelling narrow gauge railways.
Historian Charles Insley talks about his passion for modelling narrow gauge railways, and how he takes inspiration from the UK, Ireland and beyond.
I’ve been an active modeller for 38 years and for 37 of them I’ve modelled in ‘OO9’. There have been brief diversions into American ‘N’ gauge and ‘O/16.5’, but I’ve always returned to ‘OO9’. When I began, it wasn’t a particularly well supported scale. There was RTR ‘HOE’ but, for British-outline locomotives, whitemetal kits atop ‘N’ gauge mechanisms were the way forward. My dad had dabbled in ‘OO9’ in the 1970s, as a feeder to his ‘OO’ layout, following holidays in North Wales. I remember pestering him to buy the GEM kit of the Ffestiniog Railway’s Prince 0-4-0ST (Duke in certain children’s books!) and the same family holidays introduced me to steam railways that weren’t big and scary. I was hooked. Like many ‘Oo9ers’, I started out by replicating the railways I’d seen on holiday. I was very keen on the Ffestiniog and the Talyllyn, and there were just enough kits available to make this viable, providing a solid grounding in plastic and whitemetal kit construction. For about 15 years I modelled Welsh narrow gauge and nothing else. A family holiday to Donegal, Ireland, introduced me to Irish 3ft gauge and that was the start of the broadening of my modelling horizons. I spent a few years modelling Irish 3ft, in 3mm scale, using ‘N’ gauge track (‘TTN3’), but also got drawn into modelling other types of narrow gauge beyond the ‘classic’ North Wales-based mineral railway. As well as a joint layout, built with my wife and set in Anthony Trollope and Angela Thirkell’s fictional (but definitely not Welsh) county of Barsetshire, inspired loosely by the Welshpool and Llanfair Light Railway, I have also modelled French 60cm gauge railways, British overseas/colonial railways and am currently building a layout inspired by the 60cm/2ft gauge lines in Sweden. I build layouts to exhibit. I enjoy the building side of modelling immensely, but most of the operating I do tends to be at
Narrow gauge railways were not simply scaleddown standard gauge branch lines, but had a logic, pattern and dynamic all of their own
shows. Indeed, I tend to think of exhibiting as being akin to a theatre performance: there is a story to follow, the locomotives and stock are the actors and I’m the director/producer. Alas, sometimes the locomotives forget their lines! Operating at an exhibition can be fun, but I also enjoy chatting to people. It’s always gratifying when people tell me the layout reminds them of a railway they’ve seen or travelled upon. For most of my modelling career ‘OO9’ has been a minority scale; to do it you had to be able to build kits and this naturally put a lot of people off. The last seven or eight years, therefore, have been a revelation, in part due to the entry of the big manufacturers into RTR British ‘OO9’ – something I thought I’d never see. Allied to this has been the rise of 3D printing, which has made the building of locomotives and stock so much easier. The result has been a rise in the number of people modelling ‘OO9’, which is great. The arrival of Heljan’s Lynton and Barnstaple 2-6-2T and Bachmann’s WD Baldwin 4-6-0T means that ‘OO9’ models are now of a similar quality to that enjoyed by ‘OO’ and ‘O’ gauge modellers. The emergence of more ‘Oo9ers’ is a wonderful thing, but for modellers keen to get started in the gauge, there are a few things to consider. Narrow gauge railways were not simply scaled-down standard gauge branch lines, but had a logic, pattern and dynamic all of their own. In other words, to model ‘OO9’ convincingly, you have to ‘get’ narrow gauge. This means research. Most ‘Oo9ers’ create freelance layouts, so we don’t even have a prototype station or railway to follow. Freelance is seen as the easy choice, but I’m not so sure; in modelling the prototype it’s there in front of you. Freelance modelling requires a plausible reality to be created from scratch. In my day job I’m a professional historian, so research is something I do all the time. It’s also one of the most enjoyable parts of the hobby. With all of my layout projects, I start by thinking about ‘why was this railway built?’ This might mean thinking about its historical context, the local economic environment (what does the railway carry?) and the local landscape. It might even mean visiting regional archives and looking at local records. It certainly means plenty of reading. For me (and this is very much a personal thing) a good, satisfying model railway – in any scale – is one that is credible, one that you imagine could have existed, whether it ever did or not.
MODELLER’S CV Charles Insley is senior lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Manchester, and secretary of the OO9 Society. Web: www.009society.com