This gives me an opportunity to make a mental note of fads and fashions, what new things are trending or what old things are making a comeback. In this way I have seen an increase in the number of huge televisions, bi-fold doors and home cinemas and a noticeable decline in yorkstone wall features, serving hatches, magnolia colour paint and most disturbingly, in model railways or the good old home based train set.
When I say decline, where model railways are concerned it is more like a complete disappearance.
I have a special place in my life for a trainset. There was always one in my childhood home and even today my Mother still has an old clockwork engine , carriages and metal framed rails up in a box in the attic and it often makes an appearance for the purposes of wider family entertainment. There is always a good chance of a game of trains, often a bit raucous at main gatherings of Christmas and Easter. In reality, we do not need an excuse for such an outpouring of emotion and togetherness, it just happens if we feel like it.
A train set was, in my childhood something that took up all of the room.
If not being played with the huge sheet of rough, splinter inducing chipboard on which the railway system had been fixed with small tacks just had to be rested or rather precariously balanced upright against the wall or wedged behind a large piece of furniture to prevent it toppling over and causing potential harm to family, friends or casual visitors. Even if left out flat for an imagination bursting railway play time that expansive surface usually doubled up as a useful piece of furniture for young children to eat their tea off whilst watching after school TV programmes such as Jackanory, Blue Peter, Belle and Sebastien, Hectors House and Roobarb and Custard.
The actual trains were a second hand purchase and other bits of rolling stock were bought at table top and jumble sales in the local area. When the transformer was plugged in to the house electric supply it gave off an ominous, low resonance hum which could not at all have been safe. As for the electric motors in the small locomotives themselves they very rapidly gave off a burning odour and this prompted an abandonment of the session until they had cooled down sufficiently to be handled.
An abundance of British manufacturers with suitably evocative names reminiscent of great days of Empire turned out quality and therefore very expensive sets. There was a cost to ownership in regular upgrading and there were frequent trips to a model railway shop to buy another cardboard building for self assembly or a group of scaled figures of engine drivers, trackside workers and commuters.
Gradually from the 1980's the leisure time for families became crowded with new activities and technology giving more excitement and variation with the, by comparison, hard work of a train set falling out of favour. The wider availability of remote control toys, video and computer games even more compact and portable fitted in better with the idea of a tech based lifestyle.
New build houses were just too small to accommodate a bulky semi permanently mounted track system and even remodelled older houses with the fashion for a through lounge could not make use of them. Cheap imported plasticised sets began to arrive from the Far East which put a lot of the domestic manufacturers out of business.
This brings me to the present day and the increasing rarity of seeing a model railway in a private house.
Sometimes I peer in to the dark recesses of a loft space with an expectation of seeing a perfect scale model of a town, city or landscape with the light from my torch glinting on the track and well loved rolling stock. I am, in just about very case, disappointed to find nothing.
I was therefore thrilled today to come across the rarity of a model railway and an outdoors one at that.
At first I thought that the bungalow, out in a rural village, had drainage problems as approaching it along the driveway there seemed to be a drain run off gully, albeit arranged quite haphazardly on the concrete pathways.
As I got closer I could see it was a railway line and it did a full circuit around the periphery of the property. I could not hide my excitement and this, in turn, prompted the homeowner to give me a full tour and display of the small steam engine that could lap the bungalow in a matter of minutes.
It was a great treat. Perhaps, I could take out a few timbers from my own loft (there are plenty of them after all) and start to construct a world of railways.
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