Rod Stewart’s favourite model … is his railway
As the rock star unveils the miniature ‘train-scape’ he has spent 26 years completing, Joe Shute asks fellow hobbyists: are you lot off the rails?
Every day, Ian Everett walks down the hall of his Yorkshire Dales cottage and into the gritty mill town of Clecklewyke. There, for a few hours, the 72-year-old retired telecommunications manager from Oxford University sits tinkering in a 15ft by 13ft world of his own imagination.
Here in Clecklewyke, the year is 1958 when, as a youngster growing up in Yorkshire, he first became excited about the railways. There is a soaring viaduct, canal, mill chimneys and soot-smeared sandstone terraces. And through it all roars the trains keeping, naturally, to a strict timetable.
Everett has been working on this world – named after the fictitious town in JB Priestley’s When We Are Married
– for decades. He estimates he invests more than a thousand hours each year in building and maintenance and has spent somewhere in the vicinity of £10,000, although at mention of cost lowers his voice in case his wife, Betsy, is in earshot.
Sir Rod Stewart, surely, would approve. Yesterday, the 74-year-old singer unveiled his own magnificent creation on the front page of Railway Modeller magazine. Weighing in at 124ft long and 23ft wide, Sir Rod’s layout – as it is known in the modelling game – has been 26 years in the making and depicts a US city which is a cross between Chicago and New York in the Forties.
He calls it Grand Street and Three Rivers City. There are coal wagons, warehouses, overspilling rubbish bins and clogged rush-hour streets, all artfully lit in a lush late afternoon sun. “Attention to detail, extreme detail, is paramount,” Sir Rod told the magazine. “There shouldn’t be any unsightly gaps, or pavements that are too clean.”
Sir Rod later elaborated on the design on Jeremy Vine’s BBC Radio 2 show after phoning in to contest claims he hadn’t built enough of it himself. He outsourced much of the electrics, he admitted, but otherwise sculpted 90 per cent of the layout, often modelling in hotel rooms while on tour. The finished work is capable of running eight trains at a time and is so vast, he has been forced to build an attic above his Beverly Hills home to accommodate it. “A lot of people laugh about it being a silly hobby, but it’s a lovely hobby,” Sir Rod said.
The singer is wary of the media taking the “mickey” out of him, although believes attitudes are now changing towards a hobby that first started in earnest in 1920, when the model maker Hornby released its first tin-plate train: a clockwork
O gauge (1:48 model).
“It’s definitely getting cool these days,” says 65-year-old Steve Flint, the editor of
Railway Modeller, who has been at it for half a century.
“You get this real fulfilment out of creating something virtually from scratch,” he says. “That’s the secret. It’s all encompassing and that’s what Sir Rod expressed to us.”
Other celebrities have also famously gone loco: Jools Holland, music mogul
Pete Waterman and, supposedly, Tom Hanks. Even such stardust cannot hide the fact the hobby remains a male-dominated preoccupation, and largely men of a certain age.
Nostalgia certainly plays its part. Sir Rod’s love of railways dates back to a childhood overlooking the sprawling train lines leading out of north London. Also, adds Peter Davies, the 70-year-old chairman of Market Deeping Model Railway Club, the ability to be utterly in control of your surroundings. His own masterpiece is a model of the Severn Valley Railway, though with a double track layout. “In modelling, you can have your own world,” he says. “You can have your own compromises.”
The club hit the headlines last year after teenage vandals trashed its annual exhibition at Stamford Welland Academy in Lincolnshire. Sir Rod donated £10,000 towards repairing the damage and Davies says plans are afoot to make the singer an honorary member. “He is a marvellous advocate,” he says. “You can’t get far better than seeing what Rod has done in model railways.”
In such a male-dominated world, there remains a well-worn joke about “modelling widows”. Certainly, Sir Rod mentioned pulling over in the car when out driving with his wife Penny Lancaster to photograph dilapidated buildings, which he could later create for his layout.
Modelling enthusiast Peter Davies has been married to his wife, June, for 47 years, although despite the hours he puts into it she insists she is supportive of his passion. “We still do plenty of things together,” she says.
Modellers say that size isn’t everything. Take the Model Railway Club, for example, based in London’s King’s Cross and officially the oldest in the world, having been formed in 1910. Its opus is Copenhagen Fields: a 22ft by 8ft diorama of the railway yards north of King’s Cross in the interwar period which has been in the making since 1983.
Tim Watson, a 64-year-old professor in dentistry at King’s College London and club president, explains the layout has been designed to a particularly ornate standard of 2mm representing each foot.
“It’s about producing something that will not be seen again,” he says. “Like an historical record or a 3D painting.
It’s insured for £80,000 which isn’t all that much when you consider all the thousands of hours that have gone into it.”
At the tender age of 50, Tom Cunnington is considered one of the younger adult members of the Model Railway Club. A commercial manager and married father of two young children, he balances the tricky business of family life with his modelling.
“It’s a way of being able to switch off from work and family life and just get the brain to do something different,” he says. “You can recreate a working little world based on reality.”
Typically, he does a few hours a week in 30-minute spells after work in a shed at the bottom of his west London garden.
His own layout, Minories, is based on a Seventies train station in the capital of the kind he remembers from childhood.
He is delighted to have such a highprofile advocate for the hobby. “Hopefully, Rod talking about it so openly will encourage other people to be open and get involved,” he says.
The club also boasts several female members, among them Carole Bevi-smith, a 63-year-old lay minister in Wembley. She has been modelling for 40-odd years and helps run the youth wing of the club which, she is pleased to say, is well-attended by girls. Aside from running the trains, she is also a big fan of model soldiers. The boys, she says, cannot have all the fun to themselves.
Now he has released his creation to the world, Sir Rod insists it is finished for good. Although, in truth, most modellers know their work is never done. The next time Penny sees him slowing to ogle some crumbling warehouse, she would be well advised to put her foot down.
‘A lot of people laugh about it being a silly hobby, but it’s a lovely hobby’