HomeThe impermanent way
In which we build a train set on the dining table
A few weeks ago, I posted about how I’d finally made the decision to start building a model railway, because perfection is the enemy of the possible or something along those lines.
A few days later, a box arrived.
No, I don’t know why they sent such a big box, because the contents were much, much smaller.
If you want to model the Brecon & Merthyr Railway in the 1950s, Great Western pannier tank locos were extremely common. Conveniently, at the moment, you can easily buy an N Gauge train set containing a Great Western pannier tank, a couple of wagons, and a brake van to go on the back. Buying a set, with an oval of track and a power unit, means you bootstrap yourself: you can get everything you need to run one train in one box, even if all you can do is send one single train round and round in a circle. I’ll do a post explaining what “N Gauge” means at some point.
Some people might point out that the loco is in 1945-47 condition, but the wagons are in pre-1937 condition; lots of wagons never got repainted though, so really they just need to look a bit dirtier and worn-looking than they are. You might notice I’ve also bought myself a few more wagons, the well known “BR 16 ton” type. Over 200,000 of them were built in the 1950s, and they were ubiquitous on the railways from the mid-50s through to the early 1980s. The ones I bought come in pre-rusted condition from the factory, so they’re really more like a wagon of the 1970s, after the B&M had closed; but, regardless, they’re still appropriate for the train.
Ever since I was small, also, I’ve read model railway advice that says “never run your train set on the carpet! There’s too much fluff!” So, this is on our dining table, which is also nice and friendly on my knees. I deserve comfort, you know.
Naturally, I wasn’t satisfied with just a single circle of track. It wasn’t long before another box arrived.
The track is a different brand to the train set, but it’s all the same track gauge, and also, all the track is the same shape: the curves are the same radius, the straight bits are all the same length. You’d think it would all just slot together, wouldn’t you?
Well, it didn’t.
Although the track was all compatible on paper, the “rail joiners” on the train set track were bigger and chunkier than the ones on the extra track. The extra track didn’t have enough clearance, between the rails and the plastic base, for the joiner on the train set track to slide on.
If this was a proper model railway and all of the track was fastened down, I wouldn’t care about this. I’d just pull all the joiners off and replace them with thinner ones. Because this is still just a train set, which has to be taken apart again whenever we want to stop playing trains and play a board game instead, that wasn’t really an option. Option two was to replace all the joiners anyway, and just hope that the new joiners stay in place. It would have done the job, but it also sounded like a lot of effort. Option three: buy more track. The original oval of train set track went in the spares box, and I just bought myself an oval from the other brand instead.
With that done, though, we had something you could imagine was a little station. It’s not much station and you need a lot of imagination, but nonetheless, you can shunt your train about!
(This is a still from a video, so it’s a slightly blurry photo. Never mind that)
Where do we go from here? Well, there’s a few more things a full railway will need. More than one train, for one thing. I’ll post about that soon. For now though: there’s something extremely fun and simple about just being able to run your train round in a circle on the dining table, without really worrying about accuracy, authenticity, and anything else. Until we do need the dining table for something else.