I Like Trains :)

   A few years ago I ended up having a hilariously long and laborious bout of dental surgery done, removing wonky teeth, wisdom teeth, other teeth, and generally making my life a misery ("by the way, did we mention that if we nick this nerve here whilst we're operating, theres a small but very real chance you'll lose all control of your lower jaw for the rest of your life? Right, Jolly Good, lets get on with it then...").  Because the work was being done in the Birmingham Dental Hospital, it meant I was effectively house-bound for over a week at my parents house, without the ability to really go out and do much, eat, drink and so on.  So in an effort to relieve boredom and give myself something to do, I decided to build a model railway in a week from the various bits and pieces lying around in old boxes around my room from when I was younger.  I was very much into model railways when I was younger, but generally put it aside in my early teens to avoid giving the bullying bastards at school any more ammunition... though as a speccy spotty sci-fi nerd, I suspect they had plenty to be going on with anyway without needing to call me a trainspotter.

   At this point I should mention that despite an interest in railway photography, trains, and all things miniatures, I have a bit of a problem with finishing projects, which is why I have never in fact completed a model railway (the only stuff I ever seem to finish are models built for projects with actual deadlines).  The above shot is from the only railway I've ever managed to get to near-finished condition, something I built whilst at Uni so I could try miniatures photography with a new camera.  But, with little else to do on this week of dentistry hell, I set to work...

 The baseboards were offcuts from the scenic diaromas built for the Britannia Model Village exhibition in Birmingham (Jan 09).  Scenic bits came from the various boxes of junk that anyone making miniatures ends up collecting.  I dont think it was too bad for a weeks work really, and it kept me sane.

 At this point in my life however I was technically living in Yorkshire (staying with the family of my then-fiance, now-wife Amy), and after the dentistry was done and I could chew solid food again, I ended up going back to the north.  And obviously I couldnt carry these train layouts on a real train back to Yorkshire, so no doubt to my parents delight, my old bedroom ended up filled with yet more junk whilst I buggered off back up North.
   Nothing else was done with this layout, and indeed it stayed gathering dust until me and Amy finally won our battle against the UK Economy and the Treasury, and fooled Fate into letting us get a house of our own.  My parents were (naturally enough) sick of the fact my old room was filled to the rafters with half built model kits and old toys, rendering it unusable as a guest room, so they drove up one weekend with the car filled with this stuff.  Having filled our new spare room in Yorkshire with the resultant delivery of 20-odd years of my life, and having a desperate need to clear said room for guests, I then ended up taking the decision to dismantle this railway.  Not least because I also needed to canibilise parts for the Steampunk project I was by now getting into.  These snapshots then represent the only visual record of the model anyway- I shot these the day I broke the models up for parts, just quickly rushing outside to get a few pics inbetween the rain.

   In hindsight seems a bit of a shame, as with a little photoshop jiggery-pokery (tecnhical term) the model looks half decent.  Might build something a bit bigger and better for photography purposes soon, depending on how much I think Amys patience will hold up with me filling the house with yet more models...