The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Rail journey that never ends
A FORMER accountant has spent the last 40 years on a rail journey that would put any commute to shame.
Ken Morris is engaged in reproducing the golden age of rail travel on the Dundee and Angus Railway — a labour of love that began in 1974.
Mr Morris, 65, grew up in the Downfield area of Dundee and since retiring has made great strides on the project which has been “in gestation” for most of his adult life.
And two house moves later, Mr Morris has filled his St Andrews loft with a model train layout based on the Arbroath line of 1955-1965.
From his attic, Mr Morris said “life got in the way” of the project for large periods of time but did not derail work on its design.
On looking for a new home in Fife, Kinkell Terrace signalled a perfect opportunity.
“I saw the house and reported to my wife, yep that’ll do – a nice loft with a house attached!” he said.
Mr Morris trained in Arbroath in the late 1960s, often standing in the Giddings & Lewis Fraser factory offices and looking down on the north signal cabin and scissors crossover.
While much of the town’s rail infrastructure survives in varying states of repair, Mr Morris’s work recalls an era of industry and the last days of steamdriven travel.
A beautiful model of the Imperial Hotel in Keptie Street, now the Westport Bar over the road from The Courier’s Angus office, takes pride of place beside the station.
“From the feedback I’m getting, people are saying ‘you’re getting the atmosphere’ and that’s the intangible bit.”
Of the amount of time he has spent perfecting designs for crossings, buildings and tracks, he said: “I can come along to Arbroath and stand on the platform in my mind’s eye, at home. “I can’t say I’ll ever really be finished.” The rail bug bit early. “It passed from father to son — my idea of fun when I was three or four years old was to set up a couple of his wagons and let them run across the floor,” he added.
Mr Morris started his own layouts around the age of 12, adopting baseboards built by his father. Unlike many larger sets, the boards are fixed in place rather than modular — forcing him to burrow in to the set-up to fix wiring that is older than most 00-gauge train sets.
“It’s another way of keeping fit, or getting a stiff neck — one of the two.” he said.
The Morrises have a son who emigrated to Pennsylvania in the US and a daughter living in Kennoway.
Mr Morris paid tribute to his wife Grace for putting up with his relish for rolling stock for all those years.
“She’s been very understanding but it’s a lot less harmful than other things I could do,” he added.
“We’ve been married for more than 40 years and she was looking at the station box model that I’m making and said ‘how do you get the measurements?’
“I said, ‘well I count the bricks’ — and she just looked at me.” A short track from toybox to toolkit:
1891 — German firm Marklin launches the first standardised clockwork range of toy trains and tracks including a small “O” gauge, introduced due to popular demand
1901 — Frank Hornby from Liverpool receives a patent for his Meccano construction toy
1904 — British hobbyists such as WJ Bassett-Lowke and Henry Greenly begin model building and turn trains from toys into an adult pursuit
1918 — Germany was limited in production of train sets, giving the green light to an upsurge in other European production
1921 — OO (1:76 scale) and HO (1:87) gauges were set by German firm Bing and Basset-Lowke, designed as a table top toy by Greenly
1938 — Second generation OO or HO scale systems from major toy makers set new standards in realism
Post-1945 — Britain begins producing OO sets through RovexTriang, while HO is popular in the rest of Europe through Fleischmann in Germany and Rivarossi in Italy. The new models adopt 12-volt electric power.