Old layouts never die

Around the time that you’ll be reading this, I will pass a significant milestone birthday. I’m lucky that I still look younger than I am (or so I’m told). My body, however, knows exactly how old it is, and it reminds me frequently. I’m not a well-organised person. Whether it’s my desk in the Model Rail office, my workbench at home or the dining room table, they all look much the same - cluttered. That is also true of my workroom at home, where ‘Polwyddelan’ is currently under construction. Before that, I was building ‘Oakworth’. I had a shed built to accommodate the layout, better known as ‘The Railway Children’. It is facing its third winter in the shed, and I’ve had to rescue a couple of the buildings, which were showing signs of damage from damp. On occasions, I’ve opened the door to the outbuilding on a warm morning and the humidity has been palpable. I intended ‘Railway Children’ to be a lightweight, easily transported, exhibition layout. It didn’t work out that way. Certainly, Dave Lowery made the baseboards light enough for easy transport, but I wanted as few baseboard joints as possible, so the boards are large: 6ft by 2ft. They are too big to be safely carried or, more importantly, erected by one person. Furthermore, they require a Lutonbodied van for transport, and the last time I hired one for a weekend it cost £350. That’s too much to claim from the average club as exhibition expenses, so after three showings at magazine events, it hasn’t been anywhere. Disposal of layouts is usually a problem. Most of them outlive their owners, or the owner tires of the layout and goes on to build something else. In recent years, probably the highest profile layout to be lost was ‘Tetley’s Mills’, which featured in the very first issue of Model Rail. In that case, its owner Dave Shakespeare had dismantled it to build something new. Sadly, he died before he could do so, but some of his structures are being looked after by other modellers. Otherwise, small portable layouts are the only ones which are likely to be saleable, and even then, the sale price will be nothing near reasonable recompense for the time and effort that went in to building them. I’m sure many modellers would like to see some of their model-making survive for posterity, even if they would be too modest to say so. It is good, therefore, to see the progress Above: Even without its fiddleyard, ‘Polwyddelan’ is a sizeable obstruction in my workroom. CHRIS LEIGH Below: ‘The Railway Children’, or simply ‘Oakworth’ when the figures are removed, was my first - and to date, only - effort in ‘O’ gauge. being made with the Ashford International Model Railway Education Centre, which has that aim at its heart. AIMREC’S website introduction comment, regarding educating children about the importance of coal in UK history, certainly reflects my own experience - I was once asked by a young modeller what was carried in a coke wagon. Unsurprisingly, AIMREC’S potential 30,000ft of display space is already spoken for - it’s a drop in the ocean when we consider layouts that may be worthy of long-term preservation. The history of model railway ‘museums’ isn’t a particularly happy one, mostly due to the poor standard of the exhibits where the primary aim has been to fill space rather than to showcase the best examples. Pendon, of course, is the pinnacle of success. Its primary aim is not the preservation of model railways (though it has John Ahern’s seminal ‘Madder Valley’) but the creation of a large model railway. AIMREC is the first venture I’m aware of whose primary aim is the preservation and conservation of top-quality model railways and it deserves to succeed for being a bold attempt to resolve the future of at least some layouts beyond the working involvement of those who built them. n www.aimrec.co.uk