Ten things I hate about model railways (mostly "N")

1. Diesel depot layouts.  Almost always post-privatisation, seldom modelled on a real location.  Fifteen brightly coloured RTR diesels with DCC sound, farting and fizzing away like sitting on a train next to someone wearing headphones.  Cold bluish white LEDs glittering bright enough to give you a headache.  Depot layouts have now been done to death, just like GWR branch termini were in the 1970s. No more, please.

2. Kato Unitrack.  For: robust and well made, reliable, ultra easy to use, ready-ballasted, huge range. Against: looks about as realistic as Triang Series 2.  That had a moulded ballast base as well. Now stop being so lazy, everyone.  It isn’t as if you have to dismantle the layout every day so Mum can put your tea on the table.

3. Detail packs.  These are the bits that come in a bag with your new loco.  The reason they are supplied separately is that they are too fiddly even for Chinese assembly line workers to cope with.  You won’t see them when they are fitted: but you will see the splodges of Superglue that you used to stop them falling off.

4. “Optimised for DCC”. Meaning ultra high efficiency motors that have a starting voltage of about 0.8 volts.  So all that good work by the manufacturers fitting extra pickups, high spec coreless motors etc is completely undone because if you are on DC control, you won’t get reliable slow running with less than one volt at the rails, unless you clean the wheels and track every five minutes.

5. Union Mills. Writing this feels a bit like kicking a faithful old Labrador.  Without Union Mills we wouldn’t have any RTR pre-Grouping goods 0-6-0s at all.  They are inexpensive, robust and run beautifully.  But their designer really needs to buy some better measuring equipment.  Even the ruler from a school geometry set would do.  A tolerance of +/- 2mm on key body dimensions and wheel diameters is not “close enough for N”.  And the ones that aren’t black look as though they have been painted by dipping the bodies in Dulux. Must try harder.

6. Shoddy design.  Exhibit A: Farish J39.  I liked the look of this so much that I bought three. None of them ran well.  Tender drive with the motor driving one end axle, and power to the other two by a long chain of wobbly, badly moulded plastic gears.  The Germans could have got something like that to work, but Farish – no chance.  I sold one, and the other two now have torque-monster Mashima motors to overcome all the binding and friction in the geartrain.  That works, but it shouldn’t be necessary on a model costing nearly a hundred quid.

7. Exhibitors who won’t talk to you.  Model railway exhibitions are about showcasing the hobby, not just a chance to run trains all day without the wife pestering you to cut the grass.  Typical conversation with a layout operator:

Me: That ballasting looks really good, what material did you use?

Operator: mmmm.

Me: Nice loco, never seen a model of a GNWSJR Class Y before.  Did you build it yourself?

Operator: no.

Me: Err... well, nice to talk to you. Enjoy the rest of the show. (Wanders off wondering why model railway enthusiasts are so bloody weird.)

8. NEM coupler pockets in N gauge. The hobby had that one big chance to move N gauge forward by developing a decent universal coupler pocket to take alternatives to the clunky old Arnold coupler. But the job was given to a pan-European committee, and they screwed it up.  That thin flat shank makes it difficult to design an alternative coupler.  The pivoting spring-centred pocket relies on very accurate manufacturing to maintain correct coupler heights, and most manufacturers use tolerances that would have embarrassed British Leyland in the Allegro/Marina era.  Arnold NEM couplers no longer self-couple reliably, and NEM pockets won’t take Micro-Trains knuckles (the nicest of the commercial coupler designs) at all. The Dapol Easi-Shunts, which promised so much, only really work properly (at least in delayed uncoupling mode) in Dapol pockets.   On something like a Farish 2MT, where the pockets don’t swivel at all, you can use magnets so strong that they pull the loco off the rails, and the delayed-action facility still won’t work. And now we’re stuck with rubbish couplers for another forty years. Grrr.

9. Rivet-counters. Go away.  You’re just showing off your store of completely useless knowledge and we’re not interested.  And half the time your “facts” are wrong anyway.

10. Over-reliance on Rule One (“It’s my railway and I will run what I want.”) We are in danger of becoming a hobby of model loco collectors, building layouts which bear absolutely no resemblance to any real railway, anywhere, ever, but just serve as a convenient place to stick all those new loco purchases.  That’s why just about every single layout you see has a large motive power depot.  A layout without a loco shed? Unthinkable. Oh, and that much-relied-on “town in the Midlands where the GWR, SR, LMS and LNER all meet”. It exists, it’s called Banbury (stretching the “Southern” a bit, but SR locos did run through there), and none of your models look anything like it.

New layout - the "back story"

As I have said before, I like my model railways to have a convincing reason to exist, even if they are entirely fictitious.  So we are back in Border country and ex North British territory once again.  Just for a change I am going to build a through station (or a "roundy-roundy layout" as some people might say) - more on that later.  The location is Alnham, which (unlike Belstone) is a real place a few miles north of Rothbury on the edge of the Cheviot Hills.  It never had a railway, but one was planned.  The Northumberland Central Railway was intended to leave the Wansbeck Valley line at Scotsgap Junction and head north through Rothbury, Alnham and Wooler to join up with the branch from Berwick to Kelso somewhere near Ford.  In the end the line only got as far as Rothbury before running out of money, and later on the North Eastern built their own line from Alnwick to Coldstream via Wooler, which killed off any prospect of the Northumberland Central ever being finished.

But what if it had been completed?  It could have been a rather useful little line, for one reason - the large Army training area at Otterburn, established in 1911 and served for many years by rail from West Woodburn station on the Wansbeck Valley line.  Otterburn was the main reason the "Wanney" survived as late as 1966, despite losing its passenger service in 1952.  A line from Scotsgap to Berwick would have taken a lot of military traffic from Scotland off the East Coast route between Berwick and Morpeth.  Which provides me with all the excuse I need to build some interesting wagons (Warflats and Warwells) with interesting loads.

What would Alnham station have looked like?  Probably much like the stations between Scotsgap and Rothbury.  Single platform, simple wooden building, goods siding with a "kick-back" and a second siding for cattle traffic.  So I will be pulling in elements from Ewesley, Brinkburn and Longwitton to try and recreate a typical Northumberland Central Railway wayside station towards the end of the line's existence, circa 1960. Longwitton?  That name rings a bell...

Back in the late 1970s, every Easter my dad and I used to go to the two big model railway exhibitions, York and London.  One year there was a small EM Gauge layout which absolutely fascinated me.  It is the only one from all those shows that I can still remember.  It was built by Ian Futers, and was (as I can now see, having tracked down the December 1977 edition of "Railway Modeller" in which it made its first appearance) a pretty accurate and highly atmospheric recreation of  Longwitton station in around 1952. It was circular, like a clockwork train set, which was rather unusual.  Ian Futers built a whole series of layouts in the 1970s, all based on various bits of the North British empire in Northumberland.  He built a new one each year, and has had more influence on my own modelling than anyone else (possibly excepting David Jenkinson of "Garsdale Road" fame).  So "Alnham" will be to some extent a recreation of "Longwitton" but with a few differences.

Obviously it will be "N" rather than 4mm.  Ian's "Longwitton" being 4mm scale had a hole in the middle of the circle for the operator to stand in, but that won't work in "N", not in the space I have anyway.  I don't want anything less than two foot radius curves in the scenic area, and I only have about 4 x 3 overall to play with.  So I have ended up with a "squashed oval" - a continuous two foot curve through the scenic area, tightening to 9 inch "train set" curves round the back., with a passing loop in the hidden area, possibly two.  That means I will have to construct my own pointwork which should be interesting.  I've done soldered PCB pointwork before, but in EM, not N.

At this stage I haven't built anything, so nothing is settled.  Since I will have to build my own track, one possibility would be to do it in 2mm finescale (9.42mm gauge).  That has the advantage that you can actually buy track gauges for it (no-one seems to do them for code 40 rail to 9mm gauge), but will require a lot of mechanical work (new chassis for starters) and there is some debate about just how tight a curve the 2mm standards will allow.  The constructional methods favoured by 2mm loco builders look as though they don't allow a lot of sideplay on the centre axle, and it all looks a bit complicated.  It would be nice to get something running this year, so I'll probably stick with 9mm for now, and find a small machine shop to make some track gauges for me. Then I'll build the pointwork (only three points, but all of them curved) and if those work, I'll start on the baseboards.

"We're doomed!"

Well, that didn't really work.  For various personal reasons I had to stop modelling for a while.  The layout was sold on eBay along with all the stock that I hadn't messed around with.  But I'm back in the game, working on plans for a new layout (Borders steam again) and fizzing with new ideas to try, some of which will turn out to be rubbish. So I'll kick off the revived blog with an extended rant about the current state of our little hobby, before turning my attention back to actual modelling...

On the face of it we modellers have never had it so good. The quality of ready to run (RTR) models has improved out of all recognition in the last twenty years. So has the variety, to the point where the manufacturers are starting to run out of prototypes and duplicating each other. The locos run nicely (if properly assembled at the factory), wheel standards are finer, derailments and rough running are getting fewer.  Hell, you don’t even have to ballast your track any more, at least in N gauge.  Kato will do that for you. You can buy ready-to-plant buildings, easy to use scenic materials, and who needs a baseboard when you can buy a door from Wickes for £20?

But... Go back forty years and the situation was very different, even in OO which was far more popular than N and still is.  The range of RTR locos was very limited, they were poorly detailed and aimed mainly at the toy market.  So if you wanted to build a model railway as opposed to playing with toy trains you had to learn some skills.  You’d start by detailing RTR models – real coal in the tender, headlamps, a loco crew, maybe renumber or even repaint your models.  Then you’d start modifying them.  People were taking Triang Princesses and turning them into slightly stubby-looking Jubilees and Black Fives with little more than glue, Plastikard and a craft knife.

Then you’d try building a kit.  Entry level was whitemetal body on an RTR chassis, so the end result might look slightly “off” in its proportions but at least it would run. From there you could move on to complete kits – brass chassis, Romford wheels and gears and usually an X04 motor, or a Romford Bulldog if you were feeling flush.  Done that and got it to work?  How about a Jamieson kit – pre-cut brass components, solder assembly, not even the handrail positions marked out.  And once you’d done that, you would be able to scratchbuild, no bother.

At every stage one of two things could happen.  Either you would find that your skills weren’t up to the job.  There are plenty of really badly built loco kits on Ebay to prove that point.  Or you might find that, actually, you were capable of more than you thought.  As your skills improved your models got better – more complex, more detailed and better running. And that was a process that would never end.  Each model better than the previous one: each model teaching you new tricks that you could use to make the next one better still.  That’s a hobby for life.

It didn’t just work on an individual level.  People published their own work in the magazines, other modellers picked up on those techniques and improved on them, and the quality of modelling in general improved. If you take some old Railway Modellers from 1960 and 1980 and compare them, the general standard of layouts in 1980 was (with a few notable exceptions, Borchester, Buckingham etc) very much better than twenty years earlier. People were beavering away at improving the standards of wheels, track and mechanisms, and sharing what they learned.  That process gave us P4, Flexichas, coreless motors and 2mm finescale among other things.

The problem now is that no matter how far you take this process, and however good your skills, your hand-built model will never look as good as the ones you can buy in a model shop, and it will probably have cost you more money as well.  And unless you are modelling something really obscure it is unlikely you will end up with any big gaps in your fleet by sticking with RTR. So RTR is no longer the starting point, it’s the end point, and the only “modelling” anyone needs to do is some spreadsheet modelling to see if the credit card will stretch to yet another loco.  The rest is just playing trains.  It’s slow-speed Scalextric and people are going to start getting bored with it, especially with the flood of new releases now slowing to a trickle.

That’s the problem I have with the situation now.  RTR-dominated modelling is a dead end.  You can do it for years, and the only skill you will ever acquire is in crafting complaints to suppliers when locos don’t run 100% perfectly out of the box. Of course no-one is forced to use RTR.  You can build stuff if you want to.  But you no longer have to build stuff, and human nature being what it is, if you offer people a short cut most of them will take it.  Unfortunately the short cut in this case leads to the end of railway modelling as a skilled, creative hobby.  And having got that off my chest, I’m off to play with my toy train set.