Epic model railway makes tracks back to 1983
Enthusiast kept £250,000 project secret from his girlfriend as he ‘didn’t want her to leave me in horror’
SIMON GEORGE spent hours hanging over the wooden fence watching the trains rumble past.
It was, he says, his happy place, and it left an indelible mark.
So precious was the memory of those carefree childhood days that Mr George, now 53, set about creating a scale model of the Heaton Lodge Junction, near Mirfield, West Yorkshire; an exact replica of the track as it looked in 1983.
That was eight years ago. This weekend, having given up his job to dedicate every waking hour to the project, he unveiled what eventually became Britain’s biggest model railway, an astonishing labour of love that recreates every detail, from a Tesco carrier bag caught in a tree to the manhole covers in the roads.
Included in Mr George’s scale model of the 1.5-mile line is a figure of a 12-year-old boy hanging over a fence.
That figure is, of course, his 12-yearold self, based on a black and white photograph that he came across while researching the project in 2014. “A local snapper had been taking photographs of the locomotives and just happened to capture me and a couple of friends in the background,” he said. “When I saw that it was like a sign that I should plough on.”
Plough on he did. Mr George, from Ripon, North Yorks, made a pictorial map of the area using some 400 photographs he had found online alongside his own images and memories.
He started making the model railway at home, focusing on one small section at a time. When it became too big, he realised the project was going to need some serious investment of both time and money. In 2017, he sold his share of a supercar driving experience company and leased the basement of a large mill to build the track, which he then worked on full time.
The onset of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown gave him even more scope to “move it into fifth gear”.
When he met his girlfriend last year, Mr George feared she would run a mile if he told her about his project. Instead, he said he was a wine merchant, leasing the space for his business.
“Model railways don’t have a great reputation,” he said. “I didn’t want her to leave me in horror.”
However, the plan backfired some
‘Sometimes, I look up and I’m back there. The lights, the sounds, the fumes, it’s déjà vu’
what when his girlfriend decided to surprise him at work, turning up at the basement unannounced.
“She was shocked,” he admitted. “She wondered where all the wine was, but actually, she really appreciated the detail and the artistic element.”
Mr George has since spent up to 12 hours a day on the project, painstakingly recreating every detail, from houses and factories to individual trees, ferns, electricity boxes and even litter.
The finished product cost him around £250,000 and features scale models of 30 trains running on 1,500 metres (almost a mile) of track to a specific timetable, all displayed on arrival boards.
It took two friends three years to create the software that makes the railway fully automated.
“You can’t buy off-the-shelf software to make a railway of this size,” he said. “They wrote all the codes so the whole thing is computerised.”
The track is on public display at Wakefield Market, Yorks, until December 19. Mr George is hoping to take it on a national tour next year, to give families and model train buffs the chance to see it and perhaps dispel the stigma surrounding them.
As whether he achieved his goal, Mr George is resolute. “Sometimes, I look up and for a split second, I’m back there in 1983,” he said. “The lights, the sounds, the fake diesel fumes, it’s déjà vu.”