Ah, nostalgia. The curse of a backwards-looking British society, and apparently all of us in general looking at pop-culture at the moment. And indeed, here's a blog post looking back at a project from a few years ago, which in turn was looking back at my railway modelling from my childhood.
Awww. Little Me, when I was about 3 or 4 years old, before Life had much chance to happen to me, and keep on happening. My beloved 00 gauge train set too, built in secret by my parents with help from other family members and presented to me one Christmas. The 00 layout was played with very extensively, and a growing collection of Hornby stock bought or gifted to me through my early childhood. Sadly, it went to the tip many years ago after the board warped; I'd stopped being able to do much with it when a change in furniture in my bedroom when I was 10 meant there was no room for the board to go down on the floor, and I turned to the smaller N scale instead. Though long junked, the track from this 00 layout keeps finding re-use on projects even now, and I still have -of course- Thomas and all the rolling stock, safely boxed up in the loft because I am very much a manchild when it comes to railways.
Back in 2020, and with the anniversary of the Graham Farish N gauge brand on the horizon, I wanted to do something to give my old N gauge stock a run out. As mentioned above, I'd moved down to N from 00 when I was about 11, pretty exclusively running Grafar products, but that smaller layout also bit the dust some years ago. A combination of teenage peer-pressure, a lack of time, and space, meant I chose to get rid of it. I wish I hadn't these days, and in fact, typing this, I realise that actually I still don't have a working model railway. Might need to do something about that...
Anyway, back to 2020. I wanted to make something for my Grafar N stock to run on and which could serve as a bit of a test-track. After looking at some plan books, I realised that for a simple oval with a couple of sidings, I could make something new but in reference to that original childhood 00 layout.
I decided to try and as accurately as possible recreate my childhood 00 set... the major changes being that this time I'd be using MDF rather than chipboard, and it would also be braced and framed so it wouldn't warp. In fact the framing ended up being an A1 photo frame which was going to the tip after the glass smashed, so there's an element of upcycling here, and a rare bit of practical thought as to storage; it could hang on the wall somewhere.
The 1980's original had ballast and roads done with gloss grey paint, and the grass was textured paint. Or, I gather, sawdust sprinkled into the green paint as it dried. After completing the grey layers, I turned to the greenery...
The modern solution for the need to have a textured board? Stone-effect spray paint, leftover from another project.
Left to dry, then painted green, it was near perfect to what I remembered. I spent ages crawling around on that board when I was little, with it placed down on the floor of my room. Painful on the knees in summer, wearing shorts, but then I probably should have been out enjoying the sunshine.
There really wasn't a lot else to it with this build in 2020. As with my 00 set, white lines painted on for road markings, temporary buildings not glued down, and I dug out as much of my old Grafar stock as I could find. The track was standard Peco products, but on foam underlay (again, replicating the 00 layout).
This is quite special to me; my first N gauge train. The 94xx pannier, a single coach, a few wagons. Bought with birthday and Christmas money and savings. It was sat in the cabinet by the till at Ace Models, Dudley (I spent years and a great deal of money in that shop), and I can still remember the indecision on what to get. There were a few locomotives, but getting this one meant I could afford one more wagon, the Terry's Chocolate van. This little consist spent years whizzing around the early N layout, bought second-hand from a mates dad. That layout was wonderful, all tunnels and bridges, and I loved it, but it was badly damaged in an attempt to get it up into the loft out of the way, and the planned replacement that I started building at age 14 never got to the scenery stage before it was upcycled into another project. I really wish that in hindsight I'd kept it all, but there was nowhere to store it.
I can remember buying this Class 20 at the Warley Model Railway show when I was about 14, I'd wanted one for years. To my amazement it still ran perfectly after years in store.
A more recent purchase; very much a spontaneous buy from the second-hand cabinet at Frizinghall Models, it runs beautifully and I want to build a micro layout just for it. The tunnel is a Lima product, as close as I could get to an N gauge version of the ready-to-plonk plastic Hornby tunnel I had back in the early 1990's.
And here, with the N gauge versions of the Hornby 00 buildings, which did a pretty good job of duplicating the structures on my childhood layout.
As a little time-filler project, to give my N gauge stock somewhere to run, it worked very nicely (seen here with the Hornby track plan book which inspired that original 00 layout). It also hung on the wall for storage, meaning this was quite a practical layout. I had some reasonably grand plans for developing it too, as something for my kids to play with...
...and then in 2021 it got destroyed. I'd moved it to the cellar at the in-laws to do some work on it, when a pipe burst, so just like the two childhood layouts that preceded it, it's now scrapped. If I was a slightly more philosophical modeller, I might make some points about the intangibility of nostalgia, and how you can't go back to the past etc. etc. but I don't think this warrants too much deep thought given it was just something to play trains on. I do still have the trains however, so who knows, I might resurrect the idea again at some point. As I say, writing this makes me realise I'm a railway modeller who doesn't actually have a model railway, so I feel I rather need to address that in 2024.
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