Contact Model Rail
As I’m among friends, I have a confession to make… back in 2010, I started taking train numbers again. I hadn’t done it since I was about 15, but the urge came upon me as I neared middle age. Was it a looming crisis? Should I have bought a sports car instead? Who knows. But it began a little furtively, noting down locomotive numbers while
I was out and about or commuting to the office, just for fun and to help pass the many, many hours I was spending in transit.
But then it grew into buying the modern versions of the Abc pocket books, neatly underlining my ‘spots’, to keep a record of every train I saw in a calender year. I knew I had it bad when I began including DMUS and – I hate to admit this – EMUS too.
I soon began to keep a travel journal, keeping a note of every train journey
I made and what I saw/experienced en route. This then spurred me on to travel to new places, so I’d have something interesting to write about, taking photographs and pasting them into the pages. While this has proven a great help in honing my writing skills, it has also given me no end of inspiration for my practical modelling. Indeed, some of my best work for Model Rail has come about from ideas I’ve had while on a train or station platform. Unsurprisingly, my wanderings have been on hold for over a year now. However, looking through my travel journals recently, I was shocked by how much the railway landscape has changed in the last decade. Heritage infrastructure has been modernised, numerous TOCS have come and gone and several favourite train types have been withdrawn, some without the possibility of a final ride in frontline service.
My takeaway from all this? Stop putting off all those modelling projects I’ve been planning and seize the day!