According to Chris…
…sometimes you have to look back before you can look forward…
Chris takes a look at the hobby over the past 65 years since he got his first train set.
Someone, I forget who, when he reached my age, said that he found himself increasingly looking back. I’m finding that to be true but I also feel that you can’t look forward without first looking back. Can you see where you’re going without knowing where you’ve come from?
I started in this hobby at Christmas 1955. I had just turned nine years old and I was given (jointly with my younger brother) a Hornby-dublo train set. The track, an oval with a single siding, was already on a hardboard baseboard. The train was a die-cast BR 2-6-4T with some cast and tinplate wagons. The track was tinplate, too, and it was of course, the three-rail 0-12V DC electrical system.
Over the next decade I developed from a kid playing with a train set to a railway modeller. There were also dramatic developments in the model railway industry. Indeed, it was arguably a new segment of what would become the hobby industry. Hornby-dublo switched from three-rail to the simpler two-rail system and from tinplate and die-cast to plastic mouldings, only to be taken over by the makers of arch-rival, Tri-ang. The Margate firm was also upping its game as it moved away from crude track and wheel standards and aligned itself more towards Hornby’s level of style and quality, before eventually dropping the Tri-ang name altogether. Even Trix-twin, the third player in the train set game and always a poor third in popularity terms, despite making a quality product, ditched its three-rail AC system handicap and its ‘HO’ scaling to move to two-rail and a compromise 3.8mm:1ft scale. Despite
being well pleased with my Hornby-dublo layout, I yearned for the Trix-twin models. There was a ‘Britannia’ 4-6-2 and one of those weird boxy Woodhead electric locomotives that I had never seen in real life. But all three proprietary model railway systems were totally incompatible. Electrical systems, couplings, and wheel standards – none of them worked together. It was frustrating. Imagine liking two rock ‘n roll bands, one that recorded on HMV and the other that recorded on Parlophone but your record player would only play one or the other? There was also movement in what we might now call the serious side of railway modelling, hitherto the preserve of model engineers with lathe-turning skills working in gauge ‘O’ and larger. The era of the cast white metal locomotive kit had dawned, with the Keyser family selling their growing range through their London tobacco shop, and individuals including Bob Wills and George E. Mellor indulging their particular modelling interests with kits that could be built by the average modeller, albeit with limited success.
From that there grew the cottage industries where modellers with varying degrees of skill and business acumen used low-melt alloy casting and chemical etching of components to produce the kits that they wanted, while mitigating some of the cost by selling kits to fellow modellers. I joined that particular bandwagon through my friends Tony Dyer and John Senior, who had started a part-time business, Mopok (Modern Prototype Kits, OO) to make parts for parcels vans that they couldn’t find anywhere else. I recall Tony showing me an etched brass kit (the first I had ever seen) for a GER footbridge, assembled with a revolutionary new glue that had been developed for rapid field repairs of flesh wounds in the Vietnam war. We would soon know it as cyanoacrylate, or by the trade name Superglue.
The cottage industries have largely faded away, thanks to the retirement or passing of those who ran them. The businesses which survive today are mostly the full-time occupation of self-employed modellers and it is thanks to them that at least some of those one-time cottage industry products remain available and new ones are still being added.
l To be continued…
Electrical systems, couplings, and wheel standards – none of them worked together. It was frustrating
Modelling diary: Chris Leigh
I’m actually working on my own layout for the first time in several years…