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.
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