The custom of marking company property ensured that there was plenty to keep Collectors’ Corner stocked. John Mander’s Collecting Railwayana (1988) takes in signs, station furniture, buckets, scuttles, pokers, tongs, kettles, brushes, wheelbarrows, clocks, watches, weighing machines, horse brasses and tackle, parcel and newspaper stamps, sacks, tarpaulins, posters, carriage pictures, paperwork and documents (everything from engineering drawings to goods invoices), postcards and other publicity material, rulebooks, timetables, tickets and passes, luggage labels, pencils, pen nibs, inkwells, table- and silverware, cutlery, menus, saucepans, hot water bottles, chamber pots, lavatory fittings, lavatory paper (‘An LNER roll survives in the Rogers collection’), soap tablets, towels, uniforms (including badges and buttons), pay tokens, truncheons, whistles, first-aid kit, signal arms and finials, signal block instruments and tablets, cast-iron toe-plates from signal-box steps, mileposts, gradient posts, detonator cans, oil cans, lamps (indoor and out), locks, keys, locomotive whistles and every kind of nameplate, numberplate and lettered board from locomotives and trains themselves. Even this list omits esoterica such as railway telegraph insulators, of which the founding study is W. Keith Neal’s Searching for Railway Telegraph Insulators (1982).
Not all these categories have much of a following, admittedly; but the combined market in railway collectables was valued at £3 million per year by 2001. Much of this trade is taken up by posters, tickets, station signs and nameplates. Posters stand out because they have a broad, nonspecialist appeal as accomplished works of commercial art; there is even a sizeable holding at the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut. But in terms of market value, a medium-rare or medium-tatty poster will easily be overtaken by a choice station sign. British Railways’ totem-style signs of the 1950s are especially sought after, reaching a record price of £12,700 for Paddington in 2009. Locomotive nameplates rank highest of all, topped by the £60,000 paid for Golden Fleece, from a sister locomotive to Mallard, in 2004.
Nameplates from diesel or electric traction are sought after too, and have been known to fetch over £20,000, although the market for more recent examples is weaker. BR and its successor companies must share the blame here. Things began to go awry in the 1980s, when names began to be applied to butter up valued customers (The Coal Merchants’ Association of Scotland, Hartlepool Pipe Mill), swiftly followed by any sort of good cause, ephemeral or otherwise (Capital Radio’s Help a London Child, Mum in a Million 1997 Doreen Scanlon), then by tongue-in-cheek facetiousness, like the diesels named by Virgin Rail after marionettes from Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi TV series Thunderbirds. To make matters worse, identities were repeatedly exchanged, so that Royal Observer Corps was demobbed as Dave Berry and Gwynedd Dunwoody took on a new gender-swap identity as Sir Peter Hendy CBE. Names were also extended to mere multiple units, usually in flimsier physical forms than the traditional cast metal plates. But just as there are enthusiasts who collect LNER lavatory paper, so others will doubtless be ready to give pride of place over the mantelpiece to the plates from Brains, Victim Support or Penny the Pendolino.*****
As if spotting, photographing, filming, recording, writing about or collecting artefacts from the railways were not enough, they could also be copied in miniature. Toy trains arrived on the scene quickly enough and clockwork versions followed, first recorded in 1867. Toys and models are not the same thing, however; most toy trains were ‘no more like the original than a perambulator is like a steam roller’, as the Railway Magazine sniffed in 1904. Model railways properly so called are just that, a scaled-down version of some prototype existing in the real world, past or present. Interest in models – toys for grown-ups – grew up side by side with amateur fascination with railways themselves. So the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation of railway models large and small, mass-produced or hand-made, British or imported, and powered by low-voltage current or live steam as well as clockwork. At their smallest, T-gauge trains shrink the prototype to the barely feasible scale of 1:450; at the upper end, modelling shades into model engineering, using many of the same techniques as the full-size version.
It is therefore not easy to say where the line between big model and small train should be drawn. The upper limit is generally accepted as the 15-inch gauge, as pioneered from the 1870s by Sir Arthur Heywood, Bart (1849–1916), in his own landscaped grounds at Duffield Bank in Derbyshire. Heywood intended his ‘minimum-gauge’ railway to serve as a prototype for lightweight lines everywhere, and designed a Lilliputian sleeping carriage (for four) and dining car (seating eight; oil-fired stove included) to demonstrate his case. The 1st Duke of Westminster was sufficiently impressed to equip his Cheshire seat at Eaton Hall with a Heywood-designed line, but this failed to set an aristocratic trend and the main use of the minimum gauge proved to be for so-called miniature railways intended as passenger attractions. For instance, a 15-inch-gauge line was provided to carry visitors round and round the Liverpool Garden Festival, an initiative of 1984 that was meant to bring regeneration to derelict post-industrial land. But the engines and rolling stock at Liverpool were borrowed from two established and permanent railways, the Raven-glass & Eskdale in Cumberland and the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch in Kent. These lines manage to have it both ways. Many of their engines are one-third-size versions of 1920s main-line designs and all barely reach chest height on an average adult standing alongside at the platform; but each provides a public service for most of the year, over a combined length of over twenty miles. The Romney line even runs a school train, under contract with the local authority (Sir Arthur Heywood would be proud).
The model scale at which things get especially interesting is O gauge, calibrated at 1:43.5, or 7mm to the imperial foot. At this level, and doubly so at the more common OO gauge (1:76 scale, or 4mm to the foot), it becomes much easier to model a surrounding section of the world beyond the railway. A train set becomes a ‘layout’, a microcosm of some real or invented location. Decisions must be made about what sort of world this slice of life will represent, in historical time as well as geographical space.
Where these decisions can lead is illustrated by the extreme case of Pendon Parva, the 4mm-scale layout displayed in the Pendon Museum at Long Wittenham in Berkshire (now Oxfordshire). The model may be described as an imaginary portrait of a real place, for it aims to represent a typical parish in the Vale of White Horse in Berkshire as it might have been around 1930. Its founder was a lanky young Australian, Roye England (1908–95), who found himself bewitched equally by the region and by the Great Western Railway that carried him through it, on his first visit in 1925. Concerned that its rural ways were being overtaken by change and decay, he set out to create a permanent record in three dimensions.
Roye England’s first instalment, a meticulously detailed model of a pub, took him five years in the 1930s. Other volunteers joined the project, and when Country Life magazine visited in 1965 the diorama had grown to include a railway, animated by meticulously correct Great Western models (no box-fresh Hornby products here), of just the right types for the region in the years in question. The same attention to detail was extended to every element, including the use of prepared human hair on the roofs of Pendon’s cottages to represent traditional Berkshire thatching.
These guidelines still govern the present, greatly expanded incarnation of Pendon Parva. The museum’s website in 2014 carried a film taken from the front of a moving model locomotive – like the ‘phantom rides’ that entranced early cinema-goers – as it traverses the entire layout. Proceeding at a proportionately sedate speed, this uncannily realistic journey lasts over two minutes, its only false note the presence of the museum’s ceiling and viewing gallery in place of a Berkshire sky and horizon. Another film explains the profusion of model pigsties and allotments in the context of rural poverty and self-reliance, in which pig-killings were staggered to ensure mutually beneficial bartering between neighbours. ‘Railway modelling’ is ultimately too narrow a term for this extraordinary project, which en
lists social and architectural history to create a vessel for the collective memories of an entire community.
If Pendon Parva still sounds a little too sepia-tinted for some, different approaches can be found elsewhere. One of the best showcases is the London Festival of Railway Modelling, held each year in the echoing Victorian halls of Alexandra Palace. Among its regular performers is the Model Railway Club’s portable Copenhagen Fields layout, over 300 square feet in extent, which represents a huge chunk of north London in the inter-war years. The chosen scale is N gauge, at 2 mm to the foot (1:152): small enough to allow room for all the cuttings, tunnels and viaducts of this thoroughly drab district in a drab epoch, with a cunning diminution to 1:450 to create the illusion of perspective distance for streets and buildings furthest from the viewer. Other layouts tackle the modern scene in all its aesthetic banality, with big-box retail sheds, multistorey car parks and plenty of scaled-down graffiti for verisimilitude. Accessories to be had from the many specialist stalls catering to modellers’ needs include miniature tramps and street drinkers, cast in 4mm scale and ready painted.
Portable or not, layouts of this type require a commitment to slow and patient progress, and usually also a dependence on collaboration and shared decision-making. Construction of model stations and platforms must be co-ordinated with the members who wire the tracks and make the signals work. Purists may even attempt to replicate the block system, so that a large club layout resounds with the tinging of tiny bells, as messages pass wordlessly back and forth between operators who stand a few feet away from one another. This imperative to get the details right also inspires a mission to record things that would otherwise pass away: model railway magazines are full of meticulous scale drawings of buildings, lineside equipment and rolling stock. Pendon is merely an extreme case of how modelling can feed back into a sense of history, as its devotees attempt to create as close a version as possible of what the ordinary civilian past was like.
In most of these activities there is a tension between the broader picture and the tiny details, between knowledge and information. If pure information is your thing, railways certainly offer a hobby in which you will never risk running short. Consider this enticement, in the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway Society’s journal: ‘This issue of LYR Focus is the first of two [!] volumes which study the development and retrenchment of the mile of track from Rose Grove West Junction to Gannow Junction.’ The society’s website reports the intention that the journal will ‘build up’ over the years into a history of the LYR.
Yet it is difficult to see how a series of small-scale magazine articles could ever take the place of a coherent and usable history, of the kind represented by John Marshall’s three-volume Lancashire & Yorkshire survey of 1969–72, or the still more impressive three-part history of the Great Central published in 1959–65 by George Dow (1907–87). The career of this remarkable railwayman-scholar encompassed periods as a senior public relations officer, the direction of policy on posters and carriage pictures, and the management of the Birmingham and Stoke divisions. He was also a co-founder of the Historical Model Railway Society, and the author of other definitive studies ranging from railway heraldry to Midland Railway carriages. Dow thus made, wrote and modelled railway history in a single lifespan; he combined a gift for detail as well as outline, and was himself a latter-day actor in the world he described.
The perception that George Dow’s generation had passed, and that the railway landscape was being viewed through ever-smaller pinholes, led to a celebrated controversy in 1993. The occasion was an after-dinner speech at the National Railway Museum by Sir Neil Cossons, then director of the Science Museum. Notwithstanding his hallowed surroundings, Cossons charged the assembled historians and preservationists for having allowed their subject to retreat into mere antiquarianism: a harmless hobby of photo-gazing, number-listing, fact-grinding and relic-trading, with about as much social or intellectual value as the keeping of cats. Enthusiasts who missed the chance to take offence in person at the dinner were soon able to read Cossons’s restatement of his case in Steam Railway magazine: ‘Railway history is not highly regarded or even recognised in the broad spectrum of historical studies and there is no obvious advancement of knowledge, or interpretation to a wider audience.’
The historical landscape looks a little different two decades on, in part because of the foundation shortly afterwards of the Institute of Railway Studies, a postgraduate body set up as a joint venture between the Museum and the University of York. On the other hand, railway publishing – the written and pictorial record – remains scattered, undirected and diverse. It is conditioned variously by publishers’ sense of what the market wants, the programmes of societies such as that devoted to the Lancashire & Yorkshire (there are many others) and the efforts of any number of individuals. Few write in the expectation of financial reward, even fewer for academic recognition.
Yet Cossons’s speech missed a vital point: that this lack of intellectual policing can be a source of strength as well as weakness. When the academically rigorous Journal of Transport History turned to railway autobiographies in 2002, in a thoughtful article by Tim Strangleman, the verdict was sympathetic rather than dismissive. He noted how often these written lives were embedded in narratives of social existence, both in terms of the interpenetration of family and workplace and in the wider communities of railway towns and districts. Railway authors were also able to convey an acute sense of the challenges and disciplines of skilled work, and the self-conscious differences between skilled trades – engine driving among them – and the unskilled or semi-skilled sectors. Whether or not they wrote out of a sense of political engagement, some were also motivated by a desire to make a stand against oblivion. Ron Spedding, for example, wanted to show that his working world – Shildon Wagon Works in County Durham, where 3,000 worked in the 1950s – was more than ‘a collection of buildings occupied and worked by nameless robots’.
This mission to redeem the past culminates with preserved railways, another item on Cossons’s charge-sheet at York. He dared to ask the hard question of what it was that preserved railways were actually preserving. Were they truly ‘live museums’ – repositories for historic objects, displayed and operated in authentic contexts – or had they merely become another sector of the tourist industry, evoking an ill-defined sense of pastness within a well-packaged day out? The highest goal, he suggested, should be ‘to preserve and operate a railway to absolutely authentic historical and technical standards, in terms of real estate, locomotives and rolling stock, and methods of operation’.
Few preserved railways have come anywhere near to fulfilling this demand. Nonetheless, they have grown hugely in numbers and diversity since the early 1970s, where we left their story. In 2013 over 9 million passenger journeys were made on them. Among the hundred-plus concerns currently in operation are a few classic branch lines, still with a connection to the national network. Others are isolated lengths that run between stations accessible only by road, or offer only a short ride up and down a length of track from a single base. Some are narrow-gauge lines laid out along old standard-gauge routes, operating as straightforward commercial attractions. Even the most historically minded lines have to make compromises in order to keep going. Visitors expect to find facilities which historic buildings cannot always supply, as the demise of the Keighley & Worth Valley’s grim urinal at Oxenhope shows. Wheelchair access is another challenge. Maintenance and repairs that would in times past have been done at distant workshops must now be tackled on the line itself, either in purpose-built sheds (old goods sheds, even if they survive, are not really big enough), or in the open air. The practice of giving track-space to individual owners means that almost every preserved line has sidings chock-full of rolling stock awaiting attention, often in extreme decay. The cumulative effect can resemble that of the yard of an old-fashioned farmer who can’t bear to throw anything away.
The process of repair in turn complicates the mission to preser
ve, as worn-out or decayed parts are endlessly replaced. As a result, any locomotive or vehicle contains less and less historic material after each trip to the workshops. Nor are historic materials and techniques always used, even when modern safety standards have not overtaken them. What was once riveted may now be welded, what was veneered may now be laminated, what was leather may now be vinyl. Those enterprising enough to undertake the resurrection of older, timber-built carriages often end up dismantling any fabric that can be rescued for reassembly, rather as aviation enthusiasts recreate airworthy Spitfires using tangled remains from crash sites and huge quantities of money. On the Bluebell Railway, the body framework of London, Brighton & South Coast third-class carriage no. 949 has been reformed using pieces of Africa utile wood, the original Brazilian mahogany being no longer available. On completion it will join LBSCR first-class carriage no. 661, formerly used as a holiday cottage called Wind Demon at Bracklesham Bay, Sussex (no. 949 was a farm out-building in Surrey). The compartments of no. 661 are convincingly plush, with studded upholstery and braided seams, but all this fabric is new. Having lost their wheelbases when sold out of use, both vehicles now run on salvaged post-war underframes.
A more recent movement aims to recreate locomotive types that slipped through the preservationists’ net in the 1960s. The new express locomotive completed in 2008, 60163 Tornado, represents the lost A1 Pacific class, otherwise consigned to the smelting furnaces in the 1960s. Other lost locomotive types are taking shape with the help of existing spare bits, obtained from dismantling a few of the 213 ex-BR locomotives that were retrieved over many years from a scrap merchant’s stock at Barry in South Wales. Old spotters’ debates about which engine is really which have been resurrected, as cylinders, frames, boilers and wheel-sets are parted and spliced to achieve the best-looking match. Like the Blue-bell’s Victorian carriages, these locomotives will be at once old and new, authentic and imitative – specimens of ‘living history’, as anatomised by Raphael Samuel in Theatres of Memory (1994), who recognised its ability to galvanise mass interest in ways that were inaccessible to academic practice. Visitors who learn about these restorers’ compromises are thus more likely to admire than to deplore them.
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