Contact Model Rail
“To all kindred spirits for whom the crash of buffers and the snatch of three-link couplings is music to the ears”. As far as dedications go, this has to be one of my favourites. It appears at the beginning of Essery, Rowland and Steel’s seminal text, British Goods Wagons (David & Charles, 1970) and perfectly sums up the attraction of freight trains, regardless of era. There might not be as much shunting today, compared to the days of steam, but the clank of buffers as a freight train stops and starts is still music to my ears. Freight rolling stock rarely catches the headlines, as manufacturers are inevitably drawn towards the glamour of locomotives. But my primary interest has always lain with freight trains. After all, I grew up beside the freight-only line to Liverpool’s northern docks and spent my teen years watching shunting operations at Warrington’s Arpley Yard, so it’s no great surprise. I even applied for a ground staff role with EWS in my early 20s! Wagons have been on my mind a lot recently, with some eagerly anticipated ‘OO’ and ‘N’ gauge models arriving from Cavalex, Revolution Trains and Accurascale over the past few months. Cavalex’s BBA (MR280) and Accurascale’s PTAS (p90) in particular had me thinking about all those plastic and metal kits I built in the late ’90s and early noughties, which were the only means of portraying much of BR’S post-1970 freight stock with any kind of fidelity. There are still some large ‘gaps’ but, thankfully, we now have more choice in the RTR market and the level of detail continues to impress, which brings joy to this particular wagon enthusiast. Maybe the next step is to add digital sound to the wagons themselves, to mimic the clunking of couplings, the loading and discharge of cargo, squealing wheel flanges and the odd wheel flat?!