We’re back on track Rod helps save model railway ruined by vandals
A MODEL railway t hat was destroyed by vandals has been restored to its former glory – with the help of Sir Rod Stewart.
Members of the Market Deeping Model Railway Club told how t heir ‘ l i f e’s work’ had been wrecked when f o ur yout hs trashed the £30,000 display in a drunken rampage in May.
When news of the destruction spread, the club set up a fundraising page, hoping to make £500.
Instead they were shocked to get £70,000 – in just one day.
Having now raised more than £ 107,000 – including a £ 10,000 donation from Sir Rod, who has spent more than two decades making his own 124ft model railway – the club has put the fully restored sets on display at the Warley National Model Railway Show in Birmingham.
Sir Rod has also been made an honorary club member as a thank you – and will even get his own club T-shirt.
The 74-year-old singer said at the time of the incident: ‘It took me 23 years to build my model railway so I feel their pain.
‘ The collection was priceless and I am donating £ 10,000 to help compensate those affected.’
It has taken 25 club members 1,000 hours to restore the wrecked models by hand – some of the original pieces had taken years to build.
In August, Lincoln Youth Court heard how four ‘mindless’ youths had trashed the display after sharing a bottle of vodka as part of a pre-exam night out.
The 16-year-olds – who cannot be named for legal reasons – went on a 4am ‘rampage’, pushing over tables and throwing parts of the display against the wall at Welland Academy in Stamford, Lincolnshire.
Last week, Sir Rod unveiled to the world in the magazine Railway Modeller his own astonishingly detailed model of a US city in the 1940s, which is 124ft long and 23ft wide.
Shortly after its publication, he rang into Jeremy Vine’s BBC2 radio show after the presenter appeared to suggest that the pop singer had not built the model himself.
Sir Rod insisted: ‘I would say 90 per cent of it I built myself. The only thing I wasn’t very good at is the electricals, so I had someone else do that. A lot of people laugh at it being a silly hobby, but it’s a wonderful hobby.’
Club chairman Peter Davies said he was ‘delighted’ with the restoration. ‘We had to rebuild from the platform up,’ he added. ‘As chairman of the club, I am proud of all of the guys.’