According to Chris…

…it’s all too easy to be distracted from railway modelling by movie stars, and being inspired to build cameos from favourite movies.

Chris describes how his favourite movies have influenced his modelling.

Music and model railways have always seemed to go well together. I suspect, however, that a love of music is universal and that whatever one’s hobby, music can usually be enjoyed along with it. I’ve always had an eclectic musical taste. I grew up in a household where my aunt had a massive 1930s gramophone and Elgar’s Chanson du Matin introduced me to classical music. This was replaced, as soon as she was old enough, by my sister’s Dansette portable record player. On that, I learned the delights of traditional jazz through Humphrey Lyttelton and Chris Barber, but these were soon displaced by Bill Haley and rock ‘n’ roll. By the time I was old enough to buy my own records, Elvis and the Beatles had arrived though, in the Model Rail office, I’m better known as a fan of Bob Dylan, the Eagles and ELO.

It’s popular in social media to reveal what you’re listening to at the time, and MR editor Richard has made known through his editorials that he listens to the radio station Planet Rock. Like many in our office, he uses headphones to listen while he’s working. I can’t do that. I can’t write with distractions, so I do much of my writing at home, without any music on.

If your work is your hobby and you’re writing about something as all-consuming as model railways, you do need some distraction, however. It’s something to do when you take a break from the cutting mat or the soldering iron. For me, that distraction has long been movies. Here, my taste is much less broad, however. Action movies with hulky heroes who are indestructible, despite the most appalling injuries, leave me cold. I just keep wishing Bruce Willis would put on a clean vest!

I like storylines with happy endings and I’m a sucker for a movie with a strong female lead. The ‘collecting bug’, which is such a major part of the model railway hobby for many modellers, has long

I just keep wishing Bruce Willis would put on a clean vest!

afflicted me. I have lost count of how many

Class 121/122 railcars I’ve got or how many four-wheel railbuses, but I also collect autographed photographs of female film stars. Here in my study, the walls are lined with around 50. I blame Hayley Mills and Jenny Seagrove! I bought an autographed poster for the stage play Dead Guilty in which they were the stars. The play was put on by the Theatre Royal, Windsor, and the Thorndike Theatre in Leatherhead, both of which had been customers when I was in newspaper advertising, so it seemed particularly appropriate. From that, the photograph collecting began until I eventually ran out of wall space.

I did, though, find a way of combining my model railway hobby with my movie interest, and that is by modelling cameos, scenes or structures from favourite movies. I began with the ‘dancing on a log’ scene from Dirty Dancing when Patrick Swayze taught Jennifer Grey about balance by dancing on a fallen tree trunk. It was easy to model, and so recognizable that the company manager of the stage show Dirty Dancing on Tour, who was a Model Rail reader, saw it and invited me to come and see the show at Bristol Hippodrome.

I followed that with Yvonne’s café from It Could Happen to You, for which the movie makers built a mock-up café on a New York street corner. It was such a pretty building I couldn’t resist modelling it. More recently, I’ve built the standing stones and Lallybroch, the Scottish castle, from the Outlander TV series and having binge-watched Netflix during the lockdown, I’m turning Wills’ modern industrial building kit into Lansing Autobody’s workshop from the dirt track racing movie Lady Driver. I also spotted my favourite station, pretending to be Waterloo, in a truly awful British movie called Where the Bullets Fly, but I already have a model of Staines West!

Modelling Diary: Chris Leigh

I have a Model Rail ‘How to Build’ bookazine to work on but I’m busy building a pub from the movie Love’s Kitchen.

Yvonne’s coffee shop, from It Could Happen to You, was built for a New York subway layout that had great promise but has never been finished. My little cameo based on Lady Driver. A still from the movie with a great quote as a speech bubble makes up the billboard. The car used a few Land Rover parts.

Johnny and ‘Baby’ dance to Bruce Channel’s Hey, Baby! from Dirty Dancing.