Article of the Month

Early Beginnings

My interest in model railways really began in 1977 when my father returned home with a box of second-hand Lima HO Continental stock under his arm. I quickly began purchasing British Lima HO stock as the Italian Bo-Bo-Bo looked silly painted in Rail Blue with warning panels, and my pride and joy became one of the now rare class 33's no. 6524 in blue - I still have it somewhere although all the coaching stock has been lost.

Seeing that HO was restrictive in the UK, I moved on to OO and developed an unnatural interest in overhead 25kV stock - my OO stable still has an 86/0 (a mutilated Hornby), an 88 (Co-Co that never was!), an 89 (numbered 89 029 and named 'Osprey'), a 91 (numbered 91 010, this was built from a Lima 87 and hit the rails before BR's one!!) and a class 304 EMU (converted from a Lima DMU). Tip for overhead catenary buffs - fit a Relco and run from the overhead supply, then turn the lights off and enjoy the sparking!!

After a while, I found that virtually all BR stock could be purchased, kit-built or modified from existing models, and I felt that the old challenge of scratch-building the one loco that I must have in my stock had disappeared - I needed new horizons. 7mm was too big - 2mm too small - and 4mm taken to strange conclusions (the theories of broad gauge HST's follows in another Article of the Month) was either unbelievable or just plain daft.

Enter 3mm scale. Thanks to a small advert in a modelling magazine, and a bit of correspondance with the Society Membership Secretary, I was able to study this new size and realised that the mechanisms were of a buildable size, the scaling was easy (feed 4mm drawings to the photo-copier and select 75%, or take about 1/100th of the prototype size) and the Society products were not at the outrageous prices that I had noticed with all the other sizes - this had to be the one!!

From there, I have graduated to my usual low-level and have already started surgery on old Triang stock to build the items that I need (an expose on Westcountries and 2EPB building will also feature in the Article of the Month spot in months to come), as well as some attempts at scratch-building in plasticard (class 58 - Article to follow).

The future will see increasing production of EMU's, DMU's, DEMU's and diesel, electric and (dare I say it!) steam locomotives and there may be a limited number of overspill items that can be bought or bartered for your unused bits, but I will only admit this when I have built them (not like the 58's - still going after 2 years!!).......watch this space.

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