Sir Rod’s love of model trains has made me a fan at last

Never much of a fan of his music, I began to see Sir Rod Stewart in a radically new and positive light earlier this year when he chipped in £10,000 to help the poor men of the Market Deeping Model Railway Club in Lincolnshire to recover, after vandals had destroyed a decade of their hard work. That a rock star could be so devoted to, and supportive of, the ultimate geeky passion of provincial baby boomer men was deeply endearing and original.

Well, my admiration for Sir Rod has only rocketed since reading, last week, of his work on a massive, intricate model of a US railway city.

The 74-year-old has been beavering away on it for 26 years, revealing details of the project last week to the glamorous-sounding Railway Modeller magazine.

The model is based on New York and Chicago in around the year 1945, and is full of sophisticated electricals as well as amazingly detailed scenery and structures – apparently Sir Rod’s area of expertise.

Ringing in to Jeremy Vine’s show on BBC Radio 2 to rebuff the suggestion that he hadn’t made it himself, Sir Rod insisted he had built 90 per cent of the model. “The only thing I wasn’t very good at and still am not is the electricals, so I had someone else do that,” he explained.

Fair enough, particularly as in the time it took him to make the bulk of this spectacular set, Stewart has released 13 studio albums and been on 19 tours.

His attention to detail is especially impressive. “You start off with a grey,” he explained to Vine about the process of making the pavements grubbylooking. “And then you add a little concrete colour… and the cracks have to have some black chalk... and then you add a little bit of rubbish in the gutters, you add a little bit of rust here and there.”

Having conquered America, perhaps his next stop will be London. Plenty of opportunity to exercise his skills in recreating grubbiness and grey here.