Well as I sit and wait to get my stuff out of storage with all my train related swag, I found the latest MRJ in my local newsagents, they actually have a good choice of mags and its a long time since I brought any seeing as pretty much everything you will ever need or didnt know you need can be found on the internet. Its funny as going through stuff brought down from the loft from my childhood I found a box of Railway Modellers’ dating back to the late 1970’s. I can still remember the joy of collecting my copy from the said news agents on a Saturday morning and then spending the day poring over it until I had read every last article and advert.
It’s funny, although I am a proponent of emedia and think it is the way forward once the publishing companies get their heads round the new media model (I don’t want to pay the same for a digital copy as the print version and until this is addressed..) it is a pleasure finding those crumpled, worn and dusty volumes from a bygone era that once again can be sat down with a cuppa tea and reminded of how far we have come in the hobby. Lets face it who would have thought you could control your trains from a ‘mobile phone’ and that we would be using electrified sieves to model grasses.
Oh and also found in the loft was a packet of Peco track of different gauges some books on Swiss railways and a HO Atlas GP40 in Reading RR colours.
Another cup of tea and another backofanenvelope dream to plan..
Since most of my stuff is stored in our attic I get to have similar, enjoyable, experiences to the one you’ve described. Often I disappear up into the attic with the intention of looking for a particular model or worse, a magazine. It doesn’t take much to distract me and soon I’m sitting on the attic floor in a pile of old railway magazines remembering layouts I had once wanted to build or models I had been set on purchasing.
I find it interesting to compare how the layouts featured in these magazines have evolved. There always seems to be a typical Railway Modeller style layout, a typical Model Railroader layout and on and on. I feel like in RM there are fewer large exhibition layouts built by clubs and more, smaller, layouts built by individuals – though still often for exhibitions the size is smaller and that works for me. I’m still entertained by Model Railroader’s perpetual myopic view that the ultimate model railroad is one filling a basement and representing an entire region or that small layouts are only for beginners and are best built on the backs of 4×8 foot sheets of plywood.
Despite it being a beautiful sunny Saturday here in Prince Edward Island, I’m awfully tempted to head up the attic now and exhume that stack of Model Railway Constructors and spend some time getting re-acquainted with them.